


This House is Full of Noise

by rabidbinbadger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Demon Dean Winchester, Excessive Drinking, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, First Blade, Hallucinations, Hellhounds, Homophobic Language, M/M, Mark of Cain, Post-Episode: s09e23 Do You Believe In Miracles?, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Supernatural Reverse Big Bang Challenge 2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-28
Updated: 2015-01-28
Packaged: 2018-03-09 05:56:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 51,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3238820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidbinbadger/pseuds/rabidbinbadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean’s back, mostly. He’s alive and he’s kicking, he still appears to have all of the important bits- a pulse, his memories, his moral compass. Not bad going. And okay, it might all come at the price of staying away from exorcisms and holy water, but that’s not unmanageable. He has a condition. Other people learn to live around theirs, so can he.</p>
<p>The last time he was brought back from the dead it was to play a main role in the apocalypse. This time all he has to do is steer clear of churches and extra salty fries. It’s a good deal, isn’t it?</p>
<p>Cas isn’t so sure, and Sam, well, he’s caught between a rock and another fucking rock right now. He’s going to deal with any problems when they arise, and not a moment sooner. It’s not healthy, but screw it, it works, until it doesn’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Void

**Author's Note:**

> Created for the [2014 Supernatural Reverse Big Bang.](http://spn-reversebang.livejournal.com/)
> 
> Gorgeous art by [Miss_melissa](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_melissa/pseuds/Miss_melissa)  
> Fic by [rabidbinbadger](http://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidbinbadger)  
> Betad by [kaligrrrl](http://kaligrrrl.livejournal.com/) who was an absolute diamond.
> 
>    
> Title shamelessly stolen from the [Editors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyUNkkU0QnQ) song of the same name.
> 
> Art notes  
>    
> A big thankyou to my author rabidbinbadger for picking my art! yay! and for all the hours and hours of work she put into this masterpiece!
> 
> Fic notes  
> There is an instance of homophobic language, but there's a warning at the start of the chapter so it's easy to skip if that makes you uncomfortable.
> 
> I've tried to be relatively vague in the tags, because spoilers in the tags is my pet hate. That said, if there's anything you need to know before you read or anything that you're worried about just drop me a message and I'll be happy to talk.
> 
> Finally, a massive thank you to Melissa, who is an amazingly talented artist and was an absolute pleasure to work with. :)  
> Huge thanks as well to Kate, for dealing with my appalling grammar, correcting all my weird britishisms (except for the ones I was too stubborn to let go of) and pointing out the bits that didn't make sense because I'd explained in my head but somehow forgotten to do the same on the page.
> 
> This was an absolute joy to write.

He doesn’t go to hell this time when he dies. He remembers what that felt like— being dragged there by jagged teeth and churning paws— hauled across plains of glass and needles, through volcanic clouds of sulfur and brimstone. He was raw and ragged by the time he was delivered to Alastair, a mess of open wounds and bloody sores.

The first thing Alastair ever did to Dean was heal him. Alastair always healed him. One moment Dean could be a sentient tangle of nerves, screaming and raw against the air, and then the next he'd be back to himself, skin and bone and muscle and green, glowing eyes. Alastair took pleasure in erasing the marks he’d inflicted. He knew it made it worse, somehow. All that torture, all the cracked bones and pulped up flesh and not a single nick or scrape on the outside left to show it. It was still there though, hidden in the place that Alastair did his best work. A hundred thousand layers of mental scar tissue.

This isn’t anything like that. This time there’s nothing much. He’s dormant, floating aimlessly through blank space. He panicked at first, tried to control his movements, impose a sense of order on a world where none exists. That wore off pretty quickly, and the longer he spends here the less his lack of control bothers him. Now he drifts.

Occasionally he wonders if maybe he really is in hell. There’s been a regime change since he was last damned. Maybe this is Crowley’s idea of eternal suffering— leaving everyone to their own devices, no control and only their own thoughts for company. Build-your-own hell.

Except his experience so far hasn’t been particularly hellish. If this is hell, it has a wealth of potential misery to tap in to. The trenches and valleys of Dean’s regrets and mistakes and heartbreaks, the things that plague him back on earth, they could be brought out in full force, raked over with bloody nails again and again and again. Instead he finds it much easier than usual to put that stuff out of his mind. He vaguely understands that this is a problem, that if he stays here too long not thinking will turn to forgetting and his mind will start to unravel, thread by thread. But that thought doesn’t bother him as much as he knows it should. He just keeps on floating.

It goes on like this for a time – there aren’t any days here and he’s given up trying to count the hours – and then it changes. He feels a tug, deep in the center of his being. His hand vibrates with furious, wild energy, cycling from the skin of his palms into his veins and then throughout his entire body.

“Let’s go take a howl at that moon.”

The words crash around him, deafening. They shake the void, colorless chunks of nothing crumbling, falling and vanishing as the place starts to collapse in on itself. Something comes hurtling towards him and his eyes snap shut on reflex. It’s the first thing he’s done since he arrived. It’s also the last.

When Dean opens his eyes again, he’s in his bed in the bunker.


	2. Dead Men Walking

The change from Void to Earth disorientates him. He jumps off the bed, brandishing the First Blade defensively. Crowley is standing in the doorway, but even before Dean’s eyes he starts to warp and change. His skin melts into bloody mucus; his eyes sink into his head, black and beady, and his mouth gapes open, full of crooked needle teeth. By the time the transformation is finished he looks like a grotesque slug in a suit, long arms dripping slime, patches of human skin clinging to his torso like fleshy scales.

“SAM!” Dean cries out.

He’s hallucinating, is pretty sure he’s been dead for at least a few days; this is one fight he’ll take backup on.

“He won’t be able to hear you.”

Dean puts on his best bluster. “So I’ll just have to kill you myself.”

“We both know that you’re in no state to be doing that right now.”

“I’ve got this on my side,” Dean hefts the Blade, “I’ll take my chances.”

“Hmm. Shame you can’t see straight to hold it.”

He’s right, but Dean won’t admit that.

“So enough with the foreplay and let’s get to the main event.” Crowley’s voice floats from the mouthless man-slug-aberration. “I brought you back to life. There were, shall we say complications, but I’ll leave those for you to discover on your own.”

Dean cuts in, impatient. “Look, whatever deal you think you made with Sam, can it and maybe I’ll let you out of this alive.”

“Oh, Dean. It’s cute that you think you have any say here. I brought you back, I _own_ you by all rights. But I’ve had dealings with your idea of fair play, so I took a little reassurance, a bargaining chip if you will. When I revived you I scraped off a sliver of your soul. Not enough for you to miss in your present state, but, well, you’ll understand soon enough.  Now, why don’t you have a sit down, rest those tired old bones.”

Crowley opens the door and slips out, slamming it shut behind him before Dean can follow. There’s a heavy thud, followed by another as Dean throws himself against the wood. It won’t take long for him to figure out that he can carve it in half with the Blade, and Crowley wants to be long gone by the time he gets out.

“Is it done?” Sam grabs him by the arm, spinning him around.

“Yes, but there were some minor complications.”

Sam bristles and pulls Crowley in closer, using his huge frame to reinforce the threat in his tone.

“What have you—”

“He’s alive and kicking and one hundred percent Dean, no matter how it might look.”

He vanishes, and with him, so does the force holding Dean’s door shut. He comes sprawling out and onto the floor but he jumps up immediately, furious.

“Sam! What did you promise him?”

But Sam isn’t listening. Sam’s eyes have narrowed into calculating slits and his gun is centered on Dean’s chest.

“I get it!” He shouts out at the air. “You resent being ordered around, but this. This crosses the line, Crowley.”

“Sam—” Dean starts to speak.

“No. The only reason you’re not dead is because you’re wearing my brother as a meat suit and I don’t want to damage his body any further. You shut the fuck up until your boss gets back.”

“Wearing? What? You’re making no sense, Sam.”

“Can it.”

“Sammy—”

Sam’s patience snaps and he begins to chant an exorcism. For a minute nothing happens, and then Dean collapses to the floor. He lies there, twitching through the kind of pain he hasn’t felt since the pit. There are needles burrowing their way into every spare inch of his skin, leveraging it away from the flesh ready to be stripped away. He wishes they’d just hurry up and do it already so he can pass out.

Sam finishes the exorcism and waits for the smoke to exit his brother and gush off back to hell, but it doesn’t happen. The thing writhes for a few seconds, and then it stills.

 

*

               

“Interesting.”

“What, Crowley?”

“I didn’t think there was enough demon in him to be affected by an exorcism.”

“What do you mean _enough_?”

“Oh, Squirrel, he’s one of mine, but not in the traditional sense. Sure he’s wearing the uniform, but he’s not a card carrying member.”

“For once would you just tell me what you _mean_ instead of being vague about it?”

“I used the Blade to revive him. This,” he sweeps his hand grandly over Dean’s prone form, “is the consequence. Your dear brother is something new: little bit demon, little bit human.”

“You brought him back half demon?”

“I never said half. Much less than that, judging by how he’s behaving. If there was any more than a touch of hell’s malice in him he’d have tried to eviscerate you and thrown his lot in with me. Not to mention the negligible effects of your little exorcism trick.”

“So he’s still him?”

“Mostly. Maybe a bit more obnoxious frat boy in the mix, but that all important pathetic moral compass should still be intact.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“Not my problem. I brought him back and now you owe me, Gigantor. A favor I will be collecting sometime in the future.”

“And what the hell am I supposed to tell him?”

“Well, I’d start with _you’re a demon_ and go from there. It’s not like those big, black, shades of his are easy to miss now, are they?”

For the second time that day, Crowley vanishes. He has no intention of being around when Dean wakes up again. He has a plan, as always, but for now there’s nothing he can do but wait. Dean is the epicenter of this newest scheme and true, he could have taken him away now—if he wanted Dean fighting back against him and Sam chasing them both to the very ends of the earth. Much easier to wait until this little domestic situation falls apart, and Dean comes running to him.

 

*

 

Dean’s face is pressed uncomfortably against old concrete, and he’s pretty sure there’s a pool of spit drying just under his chin. He isn’t going to open his eyes quite yet. Whatever happened, he’s fairly sure it isn’t urgent, or about to eat him, so fuck it. He’s going to have some me time. On the floor.

“You still drool in your sleep.”

“Sam!” That jolts him out of his funk and he jerks to his feet. “What happened? You were chanting and—” the floor catches his eye and he stops.

“Aw, hell no, Sam. I’m not possessed. It’s me—come on!”

“I know it’s you, Dean. I talked to Crowley while you were out. He explained some things.”

Dean grasps onto the one word.

“Crowley? You what? Not another deal—we know where those end up.”

“No, no. I didn’t make a deal. I just needed to ask about uh, your situation.”

“It’s not that big a deal, Sammy. It’s not like this is the first time I’ve been brought back from the dead.” Dean snorts.

“Yeah, but this time things played out a little differently.”

“I don’t feel different.”

“Well, you are. Crowley brought you back using the Blade. It had an…” he casts around for the right word “effect.”

Dean frowns.

“You aren’t possessed, you’re right. But you got brought back a little less human. A little more demon.”

Dean barks out a laugh.

“Yeah. Okay. Good joke, Sammy. I get it, I got killed, I was reckless, and you’re pissed at me for it.”

“Step out of the trap, Dean.”

“With pleasure.”

He takes a step forward, and he is stopped.

“No.”

“Yeah.”

“No. I can’t be a demon. I don’t feel like a demon.”

“You’re not, really. Crowley said you’re still mostly human. You just have a few of the characteristics. Not that it matters anyway. We can cure demons, this is nothing.”

Dean laughs, bitterly.

“Oh no we can’t. Not this one. Crowley said he took a piece of my soul, to make sure I paid up on my debt. Said it wouldn’t cause any problems in my current state. The implied being that if my _current state_ changes, it’s going to fuck me right up.”

“Fuck!” Sam curses. “He said I owed him but he didn’t chase it. I should have known it was too easy. Can— can he even do that? Take only some of your soul?”

“He’s the King of Hell. Who knows what power that gives him over his fucking subjects.”

“Okay, so we go after him, get it back, and then cure you.”

Dean considers a moment and then shakes his head.

“Nah.”

“What do you mean, _nah_?”

“I mean let’s leave it a little while. Okay. He’ll be heavily guarded, expecting us to come after him right now. If I’m fine then what’s the hurry? I still feel like me, I’m not tearing out any throats. Where’s the rush?”

“You’re taking being part demon remarkably well.”

Dean shrugs.

“I feel pretty good, for the first time in a long while. I can’t remember the last time I felt this mellow— not angry, not worried about you, or Cas, or guilty for all the crap I’ve pulled. If this is what being a demon feels like, and I can get it without any of the serious consequences, sign me the fuck up.”

“You can’t mean that.” Sam’s tone is skeptical. He thinks Dean’s just putting on a front, trying to make the best of the situation.

“Look, if the chance to get it presents itself, yeah let’s go get it back Operation Cure Dean, yadda, yadda. But I’m not planning on going actively looking for it, capiche?”

“And if I said I’d go do it anyway?”

“What? You think I’m going to threaten to kill you ‘cause I’m the big, bad semi-demon or whatever now? Nah. I’m asking to respect my wishes, Sammy. C’mon. I’m just back from the dead. Again. At least give me that.”

Sam isn’t convinced. He’d thought Dean would be horrified about being a demon— after all they’ve been through. Maybe he’s not in his right mind; it’s probably the shock. He’ll give it some time to sink in, wait until Dean sees reason and they can go after Crowley, get this all fixed and back to normal. Ish. Their screwed up version of normal.

For now he’ll just have to keep an eye.

“So, you, uh, gonna let me out of here now, Sam?”

 

*

 

Cas is holed up in a motel, quietly dying, when Sam calls him. This was supposed to be just a short stop on the long road back to the bunker, one motel of many, but somehow once he got into this particular bed he found it very hard to get back out. It has very little to do with the bed and all to do with Cas, really. Dean is dead, Cas himself is dying, and there is no great cause left to drive him onwards. Heaven belongs to the angels now and he wants to stay away for a while, long enough to give them time to settle and adjust without his notoriety to distract them. And he knows by the time it’s safe for him to return, he’ll almost certainly be dead.

He was planning to return to the bunker to help Sam. It’s a hard time for him, and he deserves to have someone there with him, but the longer this journey goes on the less Cas thinks that person can be him. He doesn’t know how to process his own grief, never mind help Sam with his. Thinks he’d be more hindrance than help— especially in his current state.

He won’t admit this, but his current state is two parts of the reason he doesn’t want to go back. For one, he doesn’t want to be a burden, but he also doesn’t want Sam to make him into a crusade. He is _tired_. He does not want to fight this fight anymore. Doesn’t want other people to fight it for him either. There’s only one way he can extend his life, and he is not resorting to it again. The grossest act of cannibalism that any sentient creature can debase themselves with. He’s regretted it every day since he committed it, and not because it’s killing him. This slow, rotting death is the very least that he deserves.   

Cas has resigned himself to dying, alone, in a dingy motel room, because he’s tired and sick and lonely and heartbroken, but it only takes one call from Sam to turn that around. To let him drag his aching feet out of bed and drive back to the bunker. And if Sam’s choked out words of joy are the only ones he really hears, “He’s alive, Cas. He’s alive.” He could be forgiven, because despite being an angel, he is only human in a lot of the ways that matter. But it means that he isn’t as remotely prepared for what he finds in the bunker as he could be.

Cas’s welcome home isn’t what he expected. Sam is glad to see him, radiating a guarded sort of glee. And that hesitance might have been enough to clue Cas in, warn him that everything is not as it seems, if it weren’t for the news that brought him back.

When Cas sees Dean his heart sinks, but only a little. He can see the subtle black smoke flowing through Dean’s veins. But it _is_ subtle, barely even there. This Dean is still mostly Dean, just a little bit twisted.

When Dean sees Cas, he flinches violently and leaves the room without a word.

 

*

 

Dean knows that what he’s doing is cruel, but he can’t help it. He’s been back for three days now and he still hasn’t worked out how to turn his shades off. Which means that whenever he looks at Cas, he sees his true form. And maybe once that would have been a good thing. He would have seen swirling power, arched wings and beautiful divine wrath incarnate.

But that’s not what Cas looks like these days. These days Cas looks like faint blue sparks, sputtering haphazardly through a vessel that’s dying beneath the strain. He looks like rotten bits of grace, curdling and turning green and gangrenous before they fall off and sizzle into nothing. He looks like featherless wings, broken down into two small nubs of fractured bone poking out of the torn skin of his back. And Dean can’t look. He can’t make himself stay in the same room as a Cas who is dying so obviously, so painfully before his eyes. And he knows that isn’t fair, and he knows that’s cruel. But he still does it. He is part demon now, after all. 


	3. My Heart? Red Imitation Leather

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title taken from the White Lies song, _[Tricky to Love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et6ywG4nkik)_

“Hey, Cas.”

He turns around, confused. It’s been two weeks since he came back to the bunker and Dean hasn’t even been capable of staying in the room with him for more than five minutes, never mind talking to him.

“What do you want, Dean?” He responds somewhat tersely.

He doesn’t get a verbal answer. Dean pushes him up against the library wall and latches onto his mouth, shoving his legs apart with his thigh. Cas almost goes with it, ignores his anger and confusion and just rolls with it, because he’s wanted this for years and never had the courage to take it, and then he tastes the slightest hint of sulfur coiling around Dean’s tongue. He pushes him away, furious.

Cas has thought about this moment, not a lot by earthly standards perhaps, but as an ancient force of heavenly will for whom the entire birth to final death of Dean Winchester should be less than a single frame, he’s thought about it entirely too much. He has occasionally allowed himself to wonder, with the same sort of self-preservationist skepticism that many humans practice, what would happen. _He won’t ever see me in that light, but if he did…_ The scenarios he imagined never had that much in common, but the one constant was the certainty that it would be the sort of moment that people’s heavens were comprised of. He had never once considered that the first time Dean kissed him would be some kind of fucked up power play from a man who hadn’t even been able to bear to look at him for weeks.

“No.”

“C’mon, Cas.”

“Screw you, Dean.”

“That’s what this was supposed to lead to, yeah.”

Dean grins lasciviously, and Cas just wants to punch the smug look off his face.

“For two weeks you won’t even look at me, and now you think it’s funny to push me up against a wall and joke about fucking me. Go fuck _yourself_ , Dean.” He tries to storm off but Dean grabs him by the shoulders and spins him around.

“For two weeks I couldn’t control this” he flicks his shades on and then off. “Until this morning every time I looked at you I could see bits rotting and dropping off. You think I wanted to watch that?”

The excuse doesn’t wash with Cas.

“Ten seconds, that’s how long it would’ve taken to tell me. And if I was too hideous for your precious eyes, for that small amount of time, you could have had Sam tell me. You could have fucking texted me! Don’t pretend you care.”

Cas twists out of his grip and leaves the room. Dean doesn’t follow.

 

*

 

Cas doesn’t come out of his room for a couple of days after that. He doesn’t need to eat, which makes avoiding human contact delightfully easy.  Sam tries to lure him out. He knocks on Cas’s door, invites him to watch films, go for walks, play video games, anything he can think of, but Cas always responds with a polite, “no thank you, Sam” and closes the door again. He just needs a little time to stew. He’s hurt, understandably. He’s slowly dying and instead of comforting him, one of his only friends started to ignore him. He thought he’d done something to upset Dean, was picking his actions apart and brooding, and then he discovers all he’d done was be ill. It grates.

And as for the other thing, well, he’s trying not to think about that at all.

Dean does apologize, eventually. Although not particularly graciously. He thumps on Cas’s door, announces curtly, “I’m sorry I was a jerk.” but addends that with, “but _you_ don’t have to be such a dick about it.”

Cas cracks the door open, one narrowed eye visible though the gap.

“That wasn’t a real apology.”

“I said sorry.”

“And then you called me a dick.”

“Hello, demon. It’s in the job description.”

Dean has been using that excuse a lot recently.

Cas shuts the door again, but he comes out for dinner that evening. It’s a strange, awkward affair, with only one person actually eating, and tension crackling between the other two like an electrical storm. Sam is starting to regret spending all that effort trying to get Cas out of his room, if this is the result. He chows down his salad as quick as is humanly possible when what you’re trying to eat is 4,000 individual lettuce leaves, and grabs a beer from the fridge.

Dean follows his lead and he snorts.

“I’m sorry, is there something _funny_ , Sam?”

“Does that stuff even touch the sides anymore or is it just habit?”

“Well, fuck you too.”

Dean slugs half the bottle in one go and aims a _so there_ grin in Sam’s direction. Sam huffs a laugh, and then another, and then his head dips and he devolves into hysterics. Dean snaps his fingers in front of him but it gets no reaction so he shrugs. He looks at Cas out the corner of his eye as he finishes his bottle, can see him starting to get caught up in the laughter. Dean feels a faint smile tugging at his own lips. It feels good. Normal, in as much as they get normal. Three friends laughing at a stupid joke around the dinner table. One human, one semi-demon and one disintegrating angel. Okay, that thought right there is a mood killer. If he dwells on that he’s going to sink into a major league funk, so he grabs another beer and tries not to think about it.

Sam eventually recovers and suggests they watch a film, because at least that way if things bounce back to painfully awkward and tense, he has something to stare at that isn’t the label on his beer bottle. Predictably enough they argue for nearly half an hour over what to watch.

“We’re not watching _Cannibal Holocaust_ , Dean, shut the fuck up.”

“Don’t be a baby, Sam, you might enjoy it.” He’s got his shittiest grin on. The one that suggests he’s shooting to wind Sam up.

“Dean, that film is gross.” Cas side-eyes him.

“How the fuck would you even know?”

“Metatron.” He answers absently, while fidgeting with the cushions on the sofa.

“Two against one, Dean.”

“You guys suck.” He huffs, snatching a cushion from Cas’s carefully constructed nest and buffeting Sam with it before dropping it on the floor.

“Just for that I’m taking your vote away, Dean.” Sam says, picking the cushion up and returning it to Cas.

“Don’t make me grab another cushion, douchebags.”

“Cas, any suggestions?” Sam asks, more out of politeness and to annoy Dean than because he suspects Cas will have an answer.

“Something from this year would be preferable. I’ve already seen everything else.”

Dean pulls a face. “I’m sorry fucking Rain Man, but having some jerk bag dump the classics into your head is not seeing them. I vote _Untouchables_.”

“You always vote _Untouchables_ , Dean.”

“I am an Untouchable, Sammy.”

“Then you don’t need to watch the film, you’ve lived it.”

“Screw you. If no-one else can come up with a suggestion I’m putting on _Untouchables_.”

Eventually they settle on _The Raid 2_ , because technically Cas has seen the first one so it doesn’t really matter.  Of course after that it takes another hour for Sam to download it (illegally, which still plucks at some deeply buried lawyer guilt despite all the illegal things he does in his day job) because they’re having slight internet trouble, and it’s not like they can call in the Comcast guy to their secret bunker. If only Charlie was still around. They actually worked out a way to contact her in Oz, but it requires opening a portal and some slightly rare ingredients, so they don’t want to use it unless there’s an emergency. And _my porn won’t download fast enough_ isn’t an emergency, as much as Dean might protest that it is.

The film is decent. It does the intended job at least. It shuts everyone up for a few hours, no more barbs thrown between Dean and Cas. Sam does have to avert an interspecies incident involving popcorn and an open necked shirt, but it’s nothing too strenuous. And if Dean gets a little too excited by the violence, no-one says anything, because if that’s the worst symptom he has there’s nothing to be worried about, no matter what a few old Republican crusties say about the correlation between TV violence and real life overflow.


	4. A Twat but Mostly Harmless

Sam sleeps light, like all hunters. This makes living with a dick of a demon brother who never sleeps something of a trying experience. It’s 6am and Dean is singing karaoke. Again.

It’s Sam’s own fault, really. He was the one who suggested they make a trip out of the bunker, let off some of the steam of three weeks of living all crushed up together without respite. And of course, Sam and Cas had both tacitly agreed that it was wise to be cautious for the time being, keep things relaxed. No hunts or violence, just a small jaunt to a local dive to shake off the cabin fever.

They lost Dean for twenty minutes on that trip, but they found him outside in the smoking area sharing a fag with a new drunk best friend and, stupidly, they’d assumed that was where he’d been the whole time. They re-evaluated that assumption once they got back to car and _it_ was sitting there. The monstrosity.

The thing that Dean is currently using to facilitate his recent ass-o’clock karaoke addiction is a full-blown profession machine, complete with speakers that only have two settings. Off and 11. The set-up is also too heavy for Sam to shift on his own, and no way is he going to make Cas help him out.

Dean’s singing Van Halen this time and it’s spectacularly, wildly— some might even say deliberately— out of tune. Sam wishes with all of his heart that he knew where Dean got the monstrosity from, because he’s been entertaining some very elaborate fantasies about burning the place to the ground. For starters.

“DEAN!” He shouts, hammering on the wall.

“YOU GOT ME SO I CAN’T SLEEP AT NIIIIIIGHT” Dean caterwauls back, because apparently being a demon exacerbates your sense of wildly irritating fucking irony.

Sam rolls onto his belly and stuffs the pillow over his head. It muffles the sound ever so slightly. Unfortunately the sound is being made by an industrial karaoke machine, so very slightly doesn’t stop it vibrating the walls and jarring his bones. He’s actually considering sleeping pills for the first time in forever— because the difference between sleeping through a surprise attack on the bunker because you’re too doped up and being in no shape to deal with it anyway because you haven’t slept in three days is pretty negligible.

The noise stops suddenly and he hears Cas’s gruff mumble. Sam doesn’t know what he’s saying, but he can make a guess at the old married couple bitchiness currently being spat back and forth.

 _“I’m trying to_ sleep _, Dean.”_

_“Yeah, well I’m trying to have fun. I know you’re not familiar with the concept.”_

_“I’m dying, Dean. Show me some respect.”_

_“Oh boo-hoo, we all die someday. Jesus.”_

_“Carry on blaspheming and I will exorcise you, don’t make me try.”_

He hears the thump of flesh impacting with flesh and rolls his eyes, because he’s warm and comfy and he’s willing to bet Cas just punched Dean. Sam doesn’t think he’ll hit Cas back, thinks Dean draws the line at whaling on dying friends, but he does have to check. He drags himself out of bed and into the living room to see the karaoke machine smoking and Dean and Cas rolling around on the floor, scrapping like a pair of feral cats.

He needs to get a leash for one or both of them. Maybe he can divide the bunker up. Paint a gigantic devil’s trap on one half of it and run a line of flaming holy fire down the other. Does holy fire work if it’s a line, not a circle? Well, there’s only one way to find out.

For now he resorts to filling a bucket with water and sloshing it over them. Regular, not holy, because he’s not a dick, unlike the bunker’s other two residents. They break apart, sopping wet and now both angry at him. Cas just gives Sam the death glare— the kind that almost makes you glad he isn’t powered up anymore because Sam Winchester likes his molecules un-crisped thank you. Dean on the other hand bull charges him and confronted with an angry, damp brother, Sam does the honorable thing and runs back into his room and slams the door.

 

*

 

“Hello?”

“I hear you’re looking for a good time. Well, I’ve got 6 inches of red hot American good time waiting here for ya.”

Cas hangs up.

“Who was it?” Dean yells, and Cas can actually hear the grin in his voice.

“Who did you give my number to, Dean?” Cas’s tone is terse.

“Someone needs a little stress relief.” Dean sashays into the room and makes a lewd gesture with his hand.

“Dean!”

“Why do you always blame me? I’m hurt.”

“Because I’ve met you. Who is it, how did he get my number?”

“I don’t know who it is.”

“Dean.”

“That’s it, Cas. Say my name again.”

“D—” he breaks off with a disgruntled noise. “You are _impossible._ ”

Dean smirks.

“I honestly don’t know.”

“But you _are_ behind it.”

“I never said that.”

Cas shoots off his best narrow eyed glare but the effect is somewhat ruined by a hacking cough. He’s tired and weak and he can’t be bothered to deal with Dean’s childish antics.

“Just make it stop.”

“No can do, Chuckles.”

“Please.”

“I said I can’t. Asking me nicely isn’t going to help.”

“You did it, why can’t you undo it?”

“Because I didn’t give anyone your number so much as write it on a toilet wall.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because it’s hilarious. _Heaven’s most fuckable angel, looking for a good time_. I’m amazed it took so long for someone to call you.”

“You are incorrigible.”

“I’ll incorrige your ible.”

Cas gives up and leaves the room. It’s his new coping mechanism. Dean can’t piss him off if he’s not in the same room. Except that isn’t true. Dean’s newfound capacity for being a jerk extends beyond mere walls. He’s going to irritate Cas into a slightly earlier grave.

He wishes they could go after Crowley, but Sam can’t face him alone and Cas isn’t going to be much use in his state. He can function well enough in the bunker, translating texts, categorizing objects from the stores, all light and easy work that he can do while sitting down. Holding his own in a real fight is another matter entirely. The only way they’d have a chance against Crowley is if Dean wanted to help, and, contrary to Sam’s expectations he hasn’t changed his mind on that front. So as it’s unlikely that Crowley is going to flounce back to the bunker, chunk of Dean’s soul trailing behind him, they’re stuck like this for now.

Sam stomps into the library, throwing his phone down on the table with some vehemence.

“You too?” Cas asks.

“Dirty prank calls? Yeah. People keep asking for the moose sized man with the rat sized dick— don’t you dare laugh.” He snaps at the end.

Cas raises his hands placatingly.

“How do we stop it?”

“It’s a toss-up between burning down the bar or getting new phones.”

“Hmm. And what do we do about Dean?”

“Leave him. He’s a pain, but he’s harmless.”

“That’s what you said about Crowley.”

“Crowley turned my brother into a demon and stole a piece of his soul. All Dean’s done is throw a couple of annoying pranks.”

“For now.”

“Look, can we not do this now, Cas. Things are okay, why rock the boat?”

“We’ll need to address this at some point, Sam. He can’t stay half demon forever.”

“I said let it go.”

Cas gives up. Sam and Dean have outstubborned half the forces of heaven and hell. With his current stamina he’s no match. Even this conversation is making him want to go have a lie down in a cold, dark room.

 

*

 

Sam and Cas have changed their numbers. But Dean expected that. That was only phase one of his fan-fucking-tastic plan. A limited number of guys frequent the local dive where he scrawled their numbers, and they aren’t going to call more than once each. Not once they find out the numbers are bogus. It’s cool though, ‘cause he’s got bigger and better plans. He debated whether to build it up nice and gradual, but nah. He’s gonna go in for one big shock. Well, one big rolling shock. ‘Cause toilet cubicles have a limited amount of space but weird fetishy internet forums you can put up a whole slew. Main phones, burner phones, whatever numbers he can get his hands on. Which is all of them.

It took a bit of research, and he’s going to require no small amount of brain bleach if he ever gets cured and starts caring about this shit again, but it’s going to be so worth it. Especially as he’s doing it from Sam’s own computer. It makes the betrayal that little bit sweeter.

 

*

 

Sam looks at his ringing phone and he just _knows._ But he has to answer it, because there’s an infinitesimal chance, about 00.01% of a chance, that it’s a real call. Fuck, he hates his brother. He almost lets it ring out, if it’s Garth or someone calling from a burner they’ll leave a message, right.

“Hello.”

“I heard you have a thing for amputees—”

He hangs up before it can go any further.  Dean’s sitting at the other side of the room, laughing his fucking ass off.

“Wrong number, Sammy?”

“You fucking dick.” He hurls the phone at Dean, practically growling in frustration when he ducks out of the way easily. His reflexes are sharpening with every passing day and it’s really starting to piss Sam off.

“That’s sick, Dean.”

“I don’t know what you’re looking at me for. I’m not the one with an amputee fetish.”

“Screw you.”

Sam stomps out of the room, decidedly avoiding catching Cas’s eye, with his stupid smug fucking knowing little look.

For the next six hours every single phone (apart from Dean’s) rings almost constantly. And because a lot of them leave messages Sam and Cas are forced to sit through a litany of introductory lines promising the most depraved of sexual acts that a combination of Dean’s imagination and the power of Google could come up with. It’s a long six hours. They actually get a genuine call— Garth asking for some lore, but he has the misfortune to begin the call with the words “dragon penis” and gets hung up on several times before he dials Dean’s number. Not that he’s particularly helpful, because he’s in utter hysterics. Cas hasn’t ever seen him laugh this much, and Sam not for a long time. It would be nice, if he wasn’t the king of fucking asshats. 

It takes a day for the volume of calls to slow down, another three for the trickle to fade away to only a couple a day. They change their main phones again, but they can’t get rid of the whole stock at once. For a start try buying that many burner phones in one town and see exactly how quickly someone starts getting suspicious, and there’s also the small matter of needing to have a way for people to actually contact them.

 

*

 

Dean doesn’t try anything for another week. Figures he’ll give Sam and Cas a little time to relax and let their guards down. Cas relaxes, Sam doesn’t. He grew up shoulder to shoulder with Dean, fought in far too many prank wars against him. He knows what this sort of silence means. It means Dean’s either got something spectacular planned, or he’s trying to butter Sam up so he lets his guard down.

Not that Sam’s constant vigilance really matters, because he isn’t the one who gets targeted. That falls to poor, naively unsuspecting Cas.

Cas has discovered the luxury of long showers. The shittier and less angelic he feels, the more all the little joys of being human come back to him. He can nearly taste peanut butter sandwiches. He takes a bite and there’s the slightest hint of nutty flavor, buried in the lackluster tang of molecules. And in theory he shouldn’t even be eating, but it does actually require a small amount of angelic power to maintain a vessel. Given that his supply of grace is now incredibly finite, he’s decided he doesn’t want to waste it. Therefore as of a few weeks ago Cas eats, and he showers, and he tops himself up with all those human processes Jimmy’s body once needed to keep itself going.

So he takes long showers. He uses Sam’s fancy, luxurious shampoos, and then he wraps himself up in a soft cotton towel and pads back to his room. He likes showers and he likes the little period of time after the shower where he locks his door and sits on the bed and lets his mind drift. Another thing he shouldn’t find himself doing. Another checkpoint to his mortality list. But if he started to fret every time he ticked something off he’d have worried himself to death already.

He turns off the shower, shakes his hair out like a wet dog and makes his way back to his room. His reverie is cut short as soon as she reaches his door. He may be fading and dying, but he is still just about an angel, and he can still sense the terrible, horrible wrongness emanating from his room. He manifests his weapon, drops his towel— because he’d rather face whatever is in there with two hands fighting, not one clutching at his towel to preserve his modesty, and bursts into the room.

He spots the sigil on the wall first. An Enochian warning— angelic script for _stay the fuck away here be leviathan_. And then his gaze drops to the bed, where Dean is lounging, head pillowed on his hands, dirty boots getting dust and grime all over the clean sheets. He whistles appreciatively as his gaze sweeps over Cas’s naked form and moves his hand to palm himself slowly through his jeans.

“Dean!”

Cas ducks out of the room, shutting the door behind him and gathering up his towel. But unfortunately not before Sam, summoned by the noise, gets an eyeful of angelic asscrack.

“Gross.”

“Blame your brother.” Cas actually blushes, fumbling the towel up around him and retreating back to the bathroom.

“Can you bring me some clothes?” He throws the words over his shoulder as he shuts the door.

“Wh—” Sam decides halfway through the word that he actually just doesn’t want to know. He ducks into Cas’s room, and ducks out even quicker, because apparently today is _give Sam mental scarring for life_ day. His brother is lying on Cas’s bed, jeans pooled around his ankles and no he is not going to think about what Dean was doing; he’s going to concentrate really hard on literally anything else and hopefully if he does that the memory will just cease to exist.

He grabs some of Dean’s clothes, because they’ll fit Cas slightly better than anything he owns, and knocks on the bathroom door, passing them through when Cas cracks it open ever so slightly.

“You know Dean’s in your room, right?”

“Yes.” Cas’s voice is tight.

“You know what he’s doing?”

“I can guess.”

“Cool. Well. I’m going to drink heavily and watch TV until I pass out in the hope that I don’t remember anything that’s happened today.”

“That’s probably wise.”

Cas dresses himself and stomps up to his room, hammering on the door.

“Mhhhmmm.” Dean’s voice drifts lazily out.

“Get out of my room, Dean.”

“But I’m so comfy.”

“Dean!”

“Whu?”

Cas snaps out the first few words of an exorcism. Not enough to actually send Dean to hell, assuming they even could, but enough to at least give him a headache.

“Fine. Fine!”

He comes out of the room, eyes black. He snarls when he sees Cas, spits out, “you’re leaking” as he stumbles towards his own door.

 

*

 

When Dean comes out of his room next there’s a devil’s trap in front of Cas’s bedroom door. Deliberately placed so that he can see it. It sits there, taunting him, and for a brief second it ignites a furious, rabid hatred in him, of a kind he hasn’t felt since he looked at Abaddon. And then the rage is gone, and he feels the same as before. 


	5. All Fun and Games 'til the Salt Starts Flying

Dean responds to Cas visibly locking him out of his room in a very mature fashion. He seals every inch and crack of his space with the most powerful anti-angelic sigils he can find, and he spends honest to god hours researching them, because apparently what Dean lacked to be a scholar wasn’t patience—it was motive.

But that’s not the final touch. The final touch is the horn of Gabriel painted on the back wall of Dean’s room. It means Cas often finds himself standing vacantly in front of the door. A strong angel can resist the horn of Gabriel—one as weak as he is feels its pervasive pull through every minute of the day, has to constantly try and resist it.

Every time Cas daydreams he finds himself drifting closer to the room where it’s painted, unable to break through because of the warding. He’s reading a book on demonic spells in the library, and then he blinks and he’s staring at the oak paneling of Dean’s half open door.

“You want something, Cas?”

Dean’s voice tips him out of his reverie and he makes a hasty retreat before the lewd comments begin. It’s a harmless, if irritating, prank but it also has the potential to be much darker. It wouldn’t take much to remove the angelic warding, or even alter it so that it turns into a funnel trap that lets Cas into the room but not out.

Every day that Dean doesn’t sink that low makes Cas count his blessings, but he’s not stupid. He doesn’t trust this new version of his friend, is fully prepared for the day when the demon overcomes the human in Dean enough to let him think about exercising some of his more unpalatable desires.

 

*

 

Cas is standing outside his door in a trance again. That’s how Dean knows he’s not an actual demon, because if he was, now would be the time to take advantage of him. The combination of the horn of Gabriel and the wards have him confused and vacant, but only for a few minutes.

Dean needs to think, so he moseys on down to the kitchen and grabs one of Sam’s sandwiches out of the fridge. He picks the salad out and drops it in the sink and eats the rest, out of habit and also a little bit (okay, more than a little bit) to annoy Sam.

There’s more to his little prank war (although at the moment it’s so one sided it might be better called a prank rout) than just winding Sam and Cas up. It scratches at something, a deep-seated, itching need to be out there and be doing something. Equal parts cabin fever and something more sinister. He’s bored, and he wants out of the bunker, wants to go and do something away from the constant, watchful eyes trained on him here. He also really, really needs to get laid.

But of course he kinda shot himself in the foot with the karaoke machine, because after slipping away to get it so easily there’s now literally no way Sam and Cas are going to let him on another trip out. And yeah, he could just say fuck ‘em and charge off by himself, but that’s just going to start a manhunt and he honestly cannot be fucked with that right now. And, if Dean is really being honest, he doesn’t actually trust himself at the moment. Yeah he might have the best of intentions now, but he’s not exactly having temptation thrown at him here. Maybe he’d be fine, maybe it’d be like letting loose a seal in a fishmonger and hoping it doesn’t eat any of the stock.

So he’s using these pranks as a way to keep himself under control, keep him sane. They’re like a tiny anarchy, a rebellion against the people that he cares for. The demonic tinge to his soul demands it, that he fucks with people who love him, who know his secrets and his weaknesses.

Of course the problem isn’t just that Sam and Cas know too much about Dean, the problem is also that Dean loves them both, wholly and completely, in the only way that Dean Winchester knows how to. The demon luxuriating under his skin recognizes what the human never could. The man was so consumed with the idea of his own unworthiness that he couldn’t believe an angel, ex or otherwise, would ever care for him, so in return he denied and crushed and repressed any hint of his own feelings towards Cas.

The demon doesn’t care about whether Cas loves Dean back, unless it can use it as leverage against him. All the demon cares about is who Dean loves, because that love is something that can be used against it. Because while there are still people who Dean cares about, there’s still a limit to what he’ll do.

The first thing a demon is supposed to do is kill the people it used to love. A test, to make sure hell's grip on it is as tight as it needs to be. It's a compulsion for a newly made demon, a nagging itch at the base of their skull. The demon slowly growing inside Dean feels it, but it's canny. It knows it doesn’t have enough of a hold on him to get away with something as dramatic as that, but it still needs to do something.

So it irritates, it pranks, it needles. It can't kill Sam and Cas, but it can drive a wedge between them and its host, just waiting until the right moment.

Angels see duty and intent, humans see what they want to, and demons see pressure points. The demonic element in Dean has had plenty of time knocking around his head. It knows that Sam and Cas are Dean’s weaknesses. Take them out and he’ll go down screaming too.

 

*

 

Sam catches Dean sneaking out of the utility room with a smug, sly grin smeared across his face. The one that usually means Sam is about to find itching powder in everything he owns.

“Dean I swear to god—”

“Don’t worry, Sammy. You weren’t the target.”

Sam should have known better than to trust a demon.

Two days later he notices that his shirt is making him itch. Cursing the day that Dean was born, he shrugs it off and dumps it in a bag to stop it contaminating anything else.  He searches through every one of his drawers but he doesn’t find any visible itching powder so he just chalks it down to collateral damage from whatever Dean’s unleashing on Cas and gets on with things.

By the next day it becomes clear he missed something. Sam’s entire body is crawling so badly he can almost see the insects under his skin. Cas is similarly affected, flinching repeatedly at nothing. Taking a shower works while he’s under the spray, but then he gets out and wraps a towel around himself and the barrage starts up again.

He sprints back to his room, slams the door and drops the towel, trying to remember all the remedies he’s ever used for itching powder while he fumbles to find some clothes that aren’t infected.

Eventually he pulls on a ratty pair of jeans that can’t have been worn in years and a t-shirt in a similar shape. He gathers up all of the rest of his clothes, no harm in being safe, and takes them to the washing machines. Luckily this place practically has its own laundromat, so he can pretty much get everything done in one go. He separates his lights and darks, like the grownup he is, dumps in as much washing powder as he dares, sloshes in some fabric softener too, and puts them on the least environmentally friendly wash cycle the machines offer.

He sits on guard for the whole rest of the spin cycle, making sure no malicious demon brothers can come and re-powder his clothes.

 

*

 

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. He cleaned his clothes, Dean didn’t get anywhere near them afterwards. He literally sat on guard the entire time. This shirt has not left his sight once.

And yet it’s itchier than a hair shirt. It’s actually itchier now than it was before, if that’s even fucking possible. He’s going to kill Dean. He’s going to find him and skin him and wear him as a coat because at least then he won’t be itchy. Okay. Maybe that’s too far. He’s going to have some harsh fucking words, though.

He follows the sound of cackling to the kitchen and predictably enough finds Dean at the end of it, bent over double as he watches Cas’s monkey dance.

“Dean!”

Dean looks up, grinning.

“Hey, Sammy. You got fleas too?”

“Fleas?” it throws him off for a second. Did he release fleas into the bunker? No. They’d have bites if there were fleas.

“I mean, really guys. They don’t even like humans; you must have some seriously shitty hygiene.”

“You put itching powder in our clothes.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Dean isn’t technically lying. It makes things like this all the more fun.

“I just don’t know how you did it.”

“Did what, Sam?” He flutters his eyelashes and tries to look innocent.

“Must have been in utility. Can’t get in my room.” Cas gasps out.

Sam thinks he sees a flicker of rage in Dean’s expression at the reminder of the devils trap but it passes so quickly he tells himself he imagined it.

“You’ve had your laugh, you stumped us. Now just tell us how to get rid of it and we’ll let it go.”

Sam tries to surreptitiously scratch at his lower abdomen, but Dean picks up on it.

“Got a bit of a rash down there, Sam?”

“You know full well what I have, you dick.”

“You have a rash on your dick? Over share, Sam.”

Sam grabs a handful of salt out of the cupboard and flicks it at Dean. He hisses in pain.

“We playing that game are we? How’s ‘bout I flick some acid in your face, show you how it feels?”

“Tell us or I’ll get the holy water.”

Dean’s annoyed now, and feeling stubborn.

“Fucking bring it.”

“Sam, maybe it’s best not to antagonize him.”

Cas’s attempt to calmly mediate is somewhat ruined by his fraught tone and the way he’s frantically scratching at every available surface.

“If I don’t threaten it out of him we’ll be stuck like this for months, Cas. You think you can deal with that?”

“Just make it stop.”

“You wouldn’t fucking dare, Sammy.”

Dean spreads his arms, pushing his chest forward and getting in Sam’s space. Surrendering in the most obnoxiously aggressive way possible and daring him to do something.

Sam does dare. Things get ugly. He pulls a bottle from under the counter and sprays Dean in the chest. The noise it pulls from him is a howl, agonized and furious. He looks back at Sam and his eyes are black, face twisted into a sneer. He leaps forward, driving his fist into Sam’s face where it connects with a satisfying crunch. He wants to carry on punching. His blood is roaring through his veins, his adrenaline is up and he craves the thrill of the fight. He doesn’t though. He reins himself in, eyes bulging and a vein popping almost cartoonishly on his forehead as he pulls back, flicks off his shades and ducks out of the way of Sam’s return blow.

“Fair’s fair, Sam. You try that again though and I won’t stop punching.”

Sam lunges forward anyway, in pain and pissed off.

“Enough!” Cas roars, even though the effort makes him cough. “Sam, it isn’t fair to hurt him. Dean, this has gone on long enough. It hurts, I’m bleeding and I’m sure Sam’s in pain too.”

Dean sneers.

“And what if I want you to suffer?”

“I don’t believe you do.”

“You’ve been wrong before.”

“Dea—”

“Fine! Fine. Anything to stop your fucking moping. I put itching powder in the laundry detergent, okay. Every time you clean your clothes you just add more in. Stop using that stuff and do all the usual crap and you’ll be fine. ‘kay.”

He stalks off into his room, slamming the door.

Sam and Cas exchange a look

 

*

 

Sam toys with the bottle of pink and white Ambien pills for a long while before he finally drops two of the 10mgs. With a whiskey chaser, because today’s been one of those days and he’s fucked if he’s going to bother with responsible pill taking practices. It kicks in way quicker than he expected, he just about gets his clothes off before he collapses on top of the duvet.

He sleeps long and deep that night, for the first time in years. When he surfaces it’s slow, none of the usual rapid return to consciousness. He fumbles for his phone, sees he slept for 8 hours. That’s got to be a record. Even at Stanford he couldn’t quite shake his hunter snoozing habits. He feels drowsy enough that he wants to go straight back to sleep, but he’s also fucking freezing. Comfort wins over sleepiness and he pushes himself to his feet and slings on some clothes— because unlike everyone else in the bunker he doesn’t want to give anyone dick related nightmares, and ambles into the kitchen to make his first pot of morning coffee.

Dean hails him with a giggle and runs his hand through his hair. He always does that when he knows something awkward and is enjoying not telling you about it. Sam just rolls his eyes.

“Coffee?”

“Yes please.”

He said please. Something is definitely up.

“Do demons even drink coffee?”

“Demons do whatever we want.”

“Does this mean you’ve been drinking booze?”

“Kinda hard when _someone_ has blessed it all.”

Sam had actually forgotten he’d done that. He tries to turn his laugh into a cough but from the way Dean glares at him he figures it probably wasn’t all that convincing.

“Dude, did someone turn the heating out. It’s really fucking cold all of a sudden.”

And now Dean’s the one choking back a laugh.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What’ve you done, Dean?”

Sam runs his hand through his hair, exasperated.

Except there isn’t any hair there. Just smooth, bald skin.

 

*

 

Sam doesn’t talk to Dean for three days after the incident. It’s not that he’s ignoring him, it’s that if he goes near him it’s going to be with some blessed seawater, just for overkill purposes, and he’s going to rub it in Dean’s fucking eyes.

Cas thinks he’s overreacting. Cas doesn’t understand. It’s the principal. For a start after the Nair thing they had an embargo on all things hair related, and breaking that was a dick move. Even aside from that though putting hair removal cream in his shampoo is one thing, but sneaking into his room when he was bare-ass naked, taking the time to shave his fucking hair off, that crosses a line. And okay, maybe a little bit of the reason Sam is angry is because of how unprepared he was. Dean would’ve had to take his time doing it, shaving him, cleaning up all the mess, and Sam fucking slept through it all.

Dean shouldn’t even have been able to get near him. Sam should’ve been up and on his feet and armed before Dean was even across the threshold. But he wasn’t. He fucked snored through his own shearing.

He should never have taken those sleeping pills. He let his guard down, and in other circumstances that would have been okay. He’s in the safest place they’ve ever lived, with Cas and Dean. Except there is something not quite right about Dean. Sam needs to remember that, and he needs to behave like it. Dean was starting to get pissy and violent before he died, the Mark feeding his aggression. Being revived as part _demon_ seems to have cured that, and that just shouts out wrong on every level.

He follows Cas’s lead and puts a devil’s trap in front of his room. Dean watches him do it, eyes cut into angry slits and lip curled in a sneer.


	6. Give the Boy a Match and Watch Him Set Himself on Fire

“CAS!”

Cas debates just throwing the pillow over his head and ignoring Sam’s yelling. There’s been a lot of yelling recently. He’s dying and he just wants five minutes alone in bed. Instead he’s been sucked into some kind of demonic prank fest, and now he’s being forced to mediate between a very bald and very pissed off Sam and a Dean who bursts into hysterics every time he sees his brother’s shiny head.

They can sort out their own problems for once, instead of having him run messages between them like a pair of idiots in the playground.

“Cas! C’mon!” Sam starts hammering on his door and Cas sighs and rolls out of bed. He throws on his robe, stomps over to the door and yanks it open.

“What?!”

Sam flinches. “Dial back the attitude. Dean’s missing.”

“Missing?”

“I can’t find him. No note, nothing.”

“Is he hiding somewhere?”

“Not that I can find.”

“That is the point of hiding.”

“You’re not taking this very seriously.”

“He’s put itching powder in our clothes, shaved your head,” Sam’s hand automatically flicks up to touch the stubble where his hair used to be, “hiding seems like a plausible next step.”

“I know Dean. I know where he’d hide. He’s not in the bunker.”

Cas frowns at Sam. He looks worried.

“Alright. Let’s just look one more time for my peace of mind and then we’ll get worried.”

“Fine. But if he’s slipped us—”

“An hour won’t make much difference, Sam. Like you said, you know him; you’ll be able to find him, inside or outside the bunker.”

“Fine. And dude, put some pants on.”

He gestures to where Cas’s robe is gaping open. Cas looks down, frowns and covers himself up again.

 

*

 

They sweep the bunker with the utmost care. Cas suggests putting a devil’s trap at the entrance to every room they’ve checked, so if Dean is playing a joke he can’t double back and look somewhere they’ve already cleared. It’s a good idea, and Sam’s kind of embarrassed he didn’t come up with it himself. By the time he started searching seriously he was worried enough that he wasn’t thinking too clearly. He’s getting clumsy, and he doesn’t like it. Apparently he can’t think straight when Dean’s the issue, and that’s dangerous.

They don’t find Dean on the first sweep. Or the second. Now Cas is reaching Sam levels of worried.

“He’s not here.”

“I already told you that, Cas.”

“We had to be sure.” He snaps.

“Yeah, well.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“He didn’t take the Impala, so he’ll have had to steal a car from somewhere local. I’ll take one of the other models from the garage, nothing too recognizable, and see if I can pick up a trail.”

“I’ll stay here. He might come back. It could just be cabin fever.”

“No note, though?”

“Are you trying to tell me he’s never done anything rash before?”

Sam snorts.

“Point taken. I’ll take a handful of phones. Call me if he turns up.”

“Will do. Good luck, Sam.”

 

*

 

Sam hits up the local bars first, flashing his Fed license and a picture of Dean. No one’s seen him. At least that they’ll admit to. Or it could just be that his brother’s being smart and not going anywhere too close by.

So he widens his search, taking in liquor stores and diners and basically anywhere he might have found Dean if he was human. Maybe, he realizes, on the third day of fruitless searching, this is the problem. Dean isn’t human anymore. He doesn’t need to eat, he hasn’t had a drink since that one beer ages back. Maybe he needs to stop thinking what Dean would do, and start thinking what a _demon_ would do.

Trouble is, demons are as different as people. He knows what Ruby would do; he knows what Meg would do. He knows what he’d do when he was high on demon juice.

He moves on from liquor stores to whorehouses. He still doesn’t have any luck, though.

 

*

 

Cas feels useless. All he can do is sit in the bunker and wait. He feels like a housewife from one of those war films, swooning as he waits for all the main characters to return and relieve his grief and tedium.

Inaction has never been in his nature. It was bearable before, when there was no immediate problem, but now his weakness grates on him. He’s useless. All he can do is sit here and wait on the off chance that Dean decides to amble back.

He has to do something to curb his frustration, so he starts taking walks. Short ones, because he’s weak and doesn’t want to leave the bunker empty for too long. It gives him a reason to get out of bed every day, stop him slipping back into the rut he stumbled into in his motel, back when he still thought Dean was dead.

Sam isn’t too happy when Cas tells him about his new hobby. He thinks it’s a dumb idea. Cas is weak and vulnerable, and he really should stay in the bunker to wait for Dean. Cas of course doesn’t listen to Sam, and it’s a good job he doesn’t, because that’s how he finds Dean.

 

*

 

Dean’s having a great day. He’s been on the lam, as they say, for three days now. It’s all a bit of a blur, really. He just saw the neat little pair of devil’s traps in front of the doors of the two people he cares about most in the world and, well, he kind of snapped. It’s not nice, not being trusted by the people you love. So he decided to do something not nice to them.

At first he was just going to hide, let them work themselves into a tizzy while he stashed himself in the vents or something, but then he thought, nah. Screw that. That’s not enough. He just walked out of the bunker in the middle of the night, pointed himself in a random direction, and walked. He was clever about it, too. He didn’t stop for hours, just kept on wandering. And when he did stop it wasn’t at a gas station, or a bar, or any of the places Sam would think to look for him. It was at a fucking Walmart. A place so big and so full of people that even if someone came in asking after him, they’d have fuck all chance of ever finding him.

He grabbed himself an actual pair of shades, a rucksack and as much booze as he could cram into it. And then he walked. He’s been walking for three days, throwing back whiskey and exploring the countryside around the bunker. Except for that first shopping trip, he’s never been more than about ten miles away. That’s what makes it really, really fucking funny. He also had about a bajillion missed calls before his phone started to piss him off and he chucked it into a river.

Somewhere along the way he acquired himself a new leather jacket. It’s a beauty, it really is, if a little bit bloodstained. But hey, that adds to the look. Even better, the studs are made of silver so if he stumbles across any other supernatural creatures out here he can bitchslap them with his jacket and watch them burn. And did he mention it looks fucking cool.

What doesn’t look quite so cool are his jeans. He got a tiny bit drunk (shocking, I know) and managed to go ass over tit on a rock cluster and tear the left leg off up to the knee. He looks like he’s wearing half a pair of shorts and it’s ridiculous. He doesn’t even have a knife to level it up. If he did he’d totally turn them into daisy dukes. Fuck it they’re already ruined, he might as well show off his amazing fucking ass to the world. He’d probably already have stripped off if there weren’t a metric fuck ton of nettles in this area. He heals pretty quickly, but no way in fuck does he want to get nettle stings on his dick. The indignity alone would finish him off.

He’s down to his last bottle and contemplating another store trip when he spots the figure shambling in the distance. And hey, he’d recognize that posture anyway. For a moment he considers diving under a bush, out of sight. He could track Cas wherever he’s going, scare the ever loving shit out of him or even just see what he’s doing out here in the wilderness. But it’s too late. Cas is calling his name and running towards him.

 

*

 

“Dean!”

He sprints forwards, goes to pull Dean into a hug and then stops. Dean’s covered in blood and his jeans are torn.

“You’re hurt, what happened?”

“Uh. No I’m not, Cas.” He smiles, teeth standing out brilliant white against his blood-stained face.

“There’s blood all over your face, your shirt…”

Dean can actually see the thought as it forms, washing slowly over Cas’s face.

“It’s not your blood, is it?”

Now that the panic of _Dean is injured and I can’t heal him_ is over Cas looks, really looks. The blood on Dean’s face isn’t his. And it’s not random splatters either. It’s deliberate. His mouth is dyed an almost lipstick shade of crimson, the blood streaked across his cheek and brow is in bold, asymmetrical swirls. War paint drawn in someone else’s blood.

“What did you do?”

“I went hunting, Cas. You know, the day job.”

He gestures grandly and nearly overbalances.

“What were you hunting?”

“Stuff.”

He giggles, and Cas spots the bottle dangling from between his fingers.

“Are you drunk, Dean?”

“Shhh, you can’t tell Cas. He’ll be all judgey and annoying.” He winks with theatrical exaggeration.

“Okay, I won’t tell Cas. But only if you do me a favor.”

“Fine.” He sighs overdramatically.

“Come back home with me.”

Dean lifts the bottle to his lips and sucks at it, obscenely. Cas tries to avert his eyes, but they keep flicking back. Dean notices and it only spurs him on to do it more.

“Y—you can have a shower, wash all that blood off.”

“What if I want to leave it on?”

“Well, at least come back to the bunker.”

“But I’m having _fun_ here. Why do I have to leave?” He draws out the last word in a childish whine.

“You’re nearly out of alcohol, Dean. Don’t you want to stock up?”

“Sam blessed all the juice in the bunker, little dickrat.”

“That was very mean of Sam.” Cas agrees politely, desperately trying to think of ways to get Dean back and subtly contact Sam. “I can buy you more; let’s just go back to the bunker first.”

“Why can’t we just drink out here?”

“I’m tired.”

“Fine.” Dean huffs out. “Boring Mc…boringsen.” He finishes with a triumphant flourish and strides off back in what he thinks is the direction of the bunker.

“Uh. Dean. Other way.”

“Just testing you.”

“Of course you were.”

Dean strides back off in the right direction this time. He walks with the single-minded focus of a drunkard with a plan and as such doesn’t notice that Cas has slipped behind until he’s at the door.

“Du—” He announces to the air, cutting off when he notices how far behind Cas is. He runs back, all excess energy and impatience.

“Dude, you slow.”

Cas shrugs. He doesn’t have a witty reply for that.

 

*

 

Cas slaps Dean’s hand away from the Impala’s keys.

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m a good driver.”

“So am I.”

“You’re not driving my car.”

“I know, I’m driving mine.”

Dean rolls his eyes and mutters something about pimps of the lord, but he’s out of booze and he wants more, so he rolls with it.

He doesn’t try and get out at the liquor store. He has enough drunken cunning to realize that he’s covered in blood and won’t get served. Instead he sends Cas in with a list longer than his rap sheet. Cas gets him everything he wants, and a few other things. He doesn’t buy anything under 40% ABV.

Cas is barely back in the car before Dean’s snagging one of his bags and fishing a bottle of whiskey out of it. He spends the whole drive alternating between taking great gulps and wafting the bottle under Cas’s nose, frowning every time Cas turns him down with an impatient reminder about the dangers of drunk driving.

He’s also getting a little touchy-feely. Cas keeps having to patiently relocate his roving hands away from his knees and arms. There’s none of the demonic sleaziness of some of Dean’s recent overtures to Cas, it feels more like casual drunken affection, but it’s still wildly distracting. The first time Cas feels Dean’s hand he nearly swerves off the road. By the fourth attempt he has to gruffly tell Dean to stop unless he wants to die. Dean practically deflates, drunken exuberance gone, and fidgets with the whiskey label.

By the time they get back to the bunker Dean’s perked up somewhat. He falls out of the car and when Cas comes around to help him to his feet he clings to him like a monkey to a tree branch. Cas half carries, half drags him to the living room and drops him on the sofa. He takes a few moments to catch his wind, drawing in deep, wheezing breaths and then he turns his attention back to Dean.

He’s lying across the sofa, eyes glazed and focused on nothing, bottle forgotten down by his side. That won’t do. Cas snags it from his hand and takes a deep pull, grimacing slightly. He feels it burn as it goes down. He’s going to have to be careful, his tolerance must be shot and he doesn’t have the angelic juice left to waste on keeping himself sober.

“You joinin’ the party, Cas?” Dean slurs, sitting up and reaching out for the bottle again. Cas hands it over.

They trade the bottle back and forth. Dean keeps starting to talk, forgetting what he was going to say and lapsing into hysterical laughter. Cas, tipsy as he is, can’t help but join in. He almost forgets what he’s doing, and why. His vision is starting to blur, he can barely see the flaky, dried blood on Dean’s face. They lapse into silence again and Cas forces himself to open his eyes wide, tries to achieve the enforced concentration of the drunk who needs to do something important.

Dean sees him doing it and laughs.

“Tryna keep y’self awake, Cas?”

“Maybe.” He doesn’t have the spare brain power to come up with a witty response.

“We can stop ‘f y’like?” Dean’s voice sounds off suddenly, but everything is buzzing and Cas can’t remember what that particular tone means.

“No. No.”

There’s silence again but for the sound of sloshing liquid. Dean holds on to the bottle for a bit, alternating between swinging it around between loose fingers and drinking deeply. He has his contemplative face on. The one he pulls when he’s trying to decide whether or not to say something that he knows will start a fight.

Cas isn’t aware of this. He’s not quite seeing two of Dean, but the one Dean he can see is so blurred he’s not actually entirely sure it is him. He wants to reach his hand out and touch his face, map it with his fingers because his eyes aren’t working. He doesn’t do that though, because he’s angry and scared and worried and a whole other host of shitty negative emotions. And drunk. Very drunk. He wasn’t supposed to get this drunk.

“Why y’hangin’ out wi’ me? Thought you w’re. Pissed.” Dean almost flinches at his own voice. It comes out louder than he expected.

“Am.”

“So’m I. Fuckin’ devil’s trap.” Dean flings the bottle across the room, lips pulling up into a bitter smile as it smashes.

“Scre’you, Dean.” Cas is slurring so badly the words are barely recognizable.

Dean doesn’t reply. He passes out, and Cas isn’t far behind him.

 

*

 

Cas wakes still drunk and with the worst headache he’s ever felt. He’s wet and shivering and he can hear Sam yelling. He tries to close his eyes, block out the blinding light, but Sam is insistent.

“Cas, Cas! Take these. I know it hurts, but I need you to tell me what happened.”

He doesn’t open his eyes but he does sit upright, allowing Sam to feed him the pills and then gently fill his mouth with water.

“Sam. I think I’m dying.” The noise that comes out of his mouth can barely be described as a croak.

“It’s just a hangover, Cas. A pretty serious one judging by all the bottles, but you’re not going to die.”

“I wish I could.”

“Cas, y’gotta focus. You texted me to say you’d found Dean, that you couldn’t talk but I needed to come back urgently and seal the bunker. Why? What happened?”

“Where is he?”

“He’s still passed out. You should be too; I had to do a pretty serious number on you to wake you up.”

“Is he in a trap?”

“Yeah, I dragged him over to the one by your door. I didn’t know what the problem was and I could always apologies later if it turned out not to be him.”

“Good, good.” Cas tries to stand up and suddenly he can feel the earth revolving around the sun. Or is it just the room spinning?

“Whoa there.” Sam grabs him by the arm and settles him down, handing him a huge glass of water and motioning for him to drink it. “You’re probably still pretty hammered. Just fill me in quickly and then you can sleep it off.”

“I—I found him. He’s been near the whole time. Saw blood on his face, thought he was injured. Wasn’t his.” Cas pauses, taking great gulps of the water. “He was drunk, happy. I got him back to the bunker. Couldn’t overpower him. Had to get him to drink ‘til he passed out. But he stopped. Was just lying there staring.”

“So you started drinking with him?”

Cas nods.

“Did he say whose the blood was?”

“No. Said he was hunting, implied it was a monster.”

“So, that’s not too bad.”

“The patterns on his face.”

“What patterns?”

“War paint, drawn in blood.”

Sam frowns.

“That’s tasteless, but I’m not sure—”

“His jacket. New. Silver studs.”

“What are you getting at, Cas?”

“That jacket belonged to whoever he killed.”

“Probably, yeah.”

“Most monsters don’t like silver.”

“You think…”

“Yes.”

“You think he went on a drunken bender and ended up killing a human.”

“I think we’ve had a demon under our roof for two months. We’ve been treating it like Dean, like the man we trust with our lives. I think that needs to stop.”

“He’s not going to be happy.”

“I know.”

“He’s still mostly him, though.”

“Sam,” Cas grits out, frustrated.

“Look. We trap the entrances and exits, make sure he can’t get out, but we don’t keep him in chains, and we don’t keep him in a trap.”

“Sam, he _killed_ someone.”

“No. You _think_ he killed someone. We have no way of knowing.”

Cas pushes the heels of his palms into his eyes.

“This is a bad idea, Sam.”

“I’m not condemning him to a three foot wide prison just on a hunch.” Sam snaps.

“This would be so much easier if we could just cure him.”

“Yeah, well. Crowley has part of his soul.”

“Crowley _says_ he has part of his soul. We don’t know if he’s telling the truth.”

“Exactly, so we can’t afford to take that risk. We don’t know what would happen. Maybe he’d be a psycho, like I was— except with the Mark of Cain so probably worse. Or maybe he’d die.”

“And what’s our long term plan? We can’t just keep waiting for Crowley to come to us. We need to go after him, find out if he really does have it, and if he does, get it back.”

“How, Cas? Dean won’t help, especially after this. You’re too ill and I can’t go after Crowley on my own. It’d be suicide.”

“I don’t know. Okay, Sam. I can’t offer you anything. I don’t have any answers and I don’t have any strength, angelic or otherwise. You happy?”

“Of course I’m not fucking happy. Look. You think what you want, but I’m going to at least wait until he wakes up tomorrow and see what he’s like before I condemn him to a permanent devil’s fucking trap.”

“Fine.” Cas stands unsteadily and totters towards his room. “I’m going to sleep this off so that when this does all go to shit I can do something about it.”

He climbs over Dean’s prone form and shuts his door.

 

*

 

Dean wakes up fuzzily. He has vague memories of alcohol and a fight and being outside for a long time. Oh, and finding Cas. Or did Cas find him? Uhhhhhh this is the part he hates about going on a bender. It’s not even the morning after headache that kills him. It’s the lying in a pool of your own alcoholic sweat as bits and pieces of the stupid things you’ve done gradually come back to you. To make things even worse he’s spread-eagled on the floor, which means he didn’t even make it to a bed this time.

On the other hand the concrete does feel sooo good underneath his face. Maybe he’ll just lie here for a while on the nice cold floor. Yeah, that’s a good plan. He’ll just lie here. And oh god, what did he say to Cas before he passed out. He remembers saying something and then smashing a bottle against a wall. Umph. He should get up.

He flails a leg out and hits something. In the air. Uh—uh. Hell no. He scrambles to his feet. He’s in the devil’s trap outside Cas’s room and his last memory is being pissed with Cas. He’s not worried about that so much; obviously he wasn’t planning on killing him or anything. Cas probably just stomped off in a sulk and he forgot the trap was there and tried to follow him. And then passed out.

And now he’s fucking stuck.

“Sammy! Cas!”

He screams until his throat is even hoarser and his own voice is giving him a headache. No-one comes.

“Guys! This isn’t funny!”

Eventually Cas’s door flies open.

“What?! I’m trying to die in peace.”

“Let me out.”

“My hangover is your fault. You can stay on the floor until Sam gets back.”

Cas slams the door shut. He doesn’t know how long he’s been asleep for and he doesn’t know whether Sam has finished sealing the bunker. He’s not going to be the one who lets Dean escape. And he does sort of want Dean to suffer as well. He’s weak, he’ll admit it.

Dean groans and lies back down with his feet propped up on the invisible wall and arms folded over his eyes. He knows that face on Cas. It’s his do what I say or I’ll smite you face. He can’t smite Dean right now, but he’s pissed off enough that he might drop a few lines of exorcism if he kicks up another fuss. Stupid dick angels.

 

*

 

Cas wakes up to screaming again. But this scream isn’t pain, or frustration. This is a scream of impotent rage.

He flings himself out of bed, pulls on his clothes and follows the sound. It draws him to the bunker’s main entrance, where he can see Sam and Dean. Dean is pacing up and down, screaming like a rabid animal. Every now and then he punches out at the air, fist jerking to an unnatural stop as he hits the walls of the devil’s trap he’s enclosed in.

Sam flinches with each blow. Cas calls out a warning too late, sees him lean forward to try and lay hands on his brother, try and restrain him or calm him down.

“SAM! NO!”

Dean grabs his outstretched arm and snaps it clean in two.


	7. Less Repressed, Under-dressed and Tripping Balls

Sam adds his agonized howl to the chorus and Cas has to scream his exorcism to make it audible over the noise. He pushes his body forward, ignoring its protests, and pulls Sam out of the way.

Sam needs to get to a hospital. This isn’t the kind of break that can be set at home, it needs a doctor’s attention and a solid cast. There’s no way they can leave Dean alone like this, though, so he’s just going to have to tough it out for now.

“He might calm down quicker if we’re out of the way.”

They leave Dean to rage himself to exhaustion on his own. Sam grits his teeth and talks Cas through the process of botching together a makeshift cast from a ruler, some masking tape and an old newspaper. It isn’t pretty but it will hold until Dean calms down.

It takes him two days. For the first twenty hours he throws himself at the invisible walls of his cage, screaming without pause or cease. After that his anger simmers down into something a little less rabid, although he still snarls when either Sam or Cas come near.

Not that Sam is doing a huge amount of moving at the moment. He’s mainly staying very still and grimacing in constant pain. Garth is close. They called him as soon as it became clear that Dean’s fit was going to be measured more in days than hours. He’ll be there in about forty minutes to take Sam to the hospital and get him a proper cast and some prescription painkillers.

Although his screaming rage has abated, Dean still isn’t calm. He paces around the small space, like a caged wolf, teeth clicking together and eyes darting between the exits like he’s plotting his escape. Cas sees Sam off and then stands in the doorway, watching Dean with calculating, narrowed eyes. He might not be raging any more, but he’s still more beast than man or demon. There’s no true recognition when his eyes flick over Cas, just the animal acknowledgement of a threat.

That starts to change about halfway through the second day. His pacing becomes more erratic and when he looks over at the table where Cas is now seated he pauses for a second, face written more with uncertainty than a snarl.

“Dean?”

Dean squints at him and then growls again, but it’s more hesitant than before. Cas takes it as a small victory and then returns most of his concentration to his book.

 

*

 

He hurts. His knuckles are raw and scraped clear of flesh. That, that shouldn’t happen. He heals, doesn’t he? He flexes his hands, turning them over and examining them. The wounds crack and little drops of blood ooze out. His throat burns too, and when he coughs into his palm he sees little flecks of crimson.

“Dean?”

That’s Sam’s voice.

Dean looks up, sees Sam and Cas sitting at the table, looking tired. He can see Cas’s true form, all dripping, poisoned grace. But that means he has his demon eyes on. Why? Something here doesn’t add up.

“Sammy?” His voice is cracked and raw.

“You’re back?” Sam sounds unsure.

“Wha—” He readjusts his priorities. “Water.”

“I’ll get it.” Cas slinks off.

“Do you remember what happened?” Sam asks.

Dean shakes his head.

“Look down, Dean.”

He does. He’s standing in a devil’s trap. A curl of anger unfolds in his stomach.

“Why?”

He can’t manage more than a few words at a time with his throat this parched. He hasn’t learned how to actively heal himself yet, and it appears he’s not going to do it automatically while he’s in this trap, so he’s just going to have to wait for Cas to get back with his water.

“You killed someone.”

“Who?”

“We don’t know. Cas found you wandering nearby.”

Cas comes back with his water. He puts it down on the very edge of the trap and nudges it inside the boundary so that Dean can pick it up. Cas makes sure that not a single part of his body crosses the trap line.

Dean quaffs the water down gratefully and then speaks again, slightly easier.

“I remember a little. A fight, getting drunk. Cas finding me.”

“Do you remember whether it was a man or a monster you fought?” Sam asks desperately.

“I wouldn’t kill a person.”

“We had to ask.” Cas adds quietly.

“So you stuck me in a trap because I went on a bender?”

Sam shakes his head

“We sealed the bunker so you couldn’t get out again.”

The slight anger Dean is nursing flares up at that information.

“And then what?”

“You’d passed out drunk in the trap outside Cas’s room. I let you out and went to bed. Next thing I woke up to you screaming. You were in this trap. I got too close and you did this.”

Sam gestures to his arm. Dean flinches. He hadn’t even noticed. He berates himself. His first action should have been to do an inventory of Sam and Cas’s injuries, but no. Too concerned with his own problems, as usual.

“I don’t remember.”

“You were rabid.”

“Rabid?”

“Black eyes, throwing yourself at the cage. Out of control.”

“You calmed down after a day, but you still weren’t you. You didn’t recognize me.” Cas says.

“Shit.” Dean responds, eloquently.

“Yeah.”

“So, I take it you’re not letting me out any time soon.”

“Not until we’re certain you’re not going to flip out on us again.” Sam says.

Dean’s clearly annoyed by this, but he visibly reins himself in

“Can I at least have the TV on?” He asks tightly.

 

*

 

They let him out after only a day. They know they should probably leave him there longer but he seems completely back to himself. He’s calm, if a little bitchy about being cooped up. He’s also genuinely regretful over what he did to Sam, even if it was in some sort of fugue state.

Things go back to a fragile sort of normal after that. But only because Dean’s keeping a secret from the other two. He’s different, and not in an intangible way. There’s excess energy sparking through him like an electric current. He tries to drain it off, get rid of it by sprinting wall to wall, punching at bags under the guise of training. He knows it’s not enough though. His muscles don’t burn with a need to stretch themselves; it’s bloodlust that he can feel scratching at his insides.

Whatever it was that he killed, and he has his suspicions he’s just choosing not to address them, it seems to have reawakened that part of him. It’s manageable, for now, though. So he ignores it, like the Winchester that he is. Instead he turns to his tried and tested method of repression. Drinking heavily.

Sam tries to fight him on the drinking front, but Dean just takes his laptop hostage and plays you-don’t-think-I’ll-fucking-do-this-but-I-will with Sam over the location of their secret hideaway and the Walmart delivery van. Sam caves, and Dean gets his booze.

He doesn’t drink enough to get out of control, duh. He doesn’t want to wake up in a devil’s trap again. He just drinks enough to keep himself juiced and relaxed. He’s always been a happy drunk, why not moderate out all that bloodlust with a bit of fun in a bottle.

 

*

 

Dean seems to operate on an inverse emotional scale to everyone else in the bunker these days. The tenser they get, the more chilled he does. Which in turn makes them even tenser, because it’s not a normal reaction. They’re keyed in to every little abnormal move he makes, watching and waiting for the sign that he’s about to snap and they’re going to have to restrain him again until he comes back.

They’re not sure how to take it when he stops wearing pants. He just walks out of his room one day, flushed and sweaty and naked from the waist down. Sam sees him first and is horrified.

“Dean. Dude. Pants.”

“What about ‘em?”

“You’re not wearing any.” There is no good place to look. Can’t be below the shoulders because otherwise _it_ is in his peripheral. Can’t look him in the eyes because that’s just creepy. Sam settles for somewhere just over the top of his head.

“Oh. Yeah.”

Dean shrugs and just carries on about his day.

“Dude. Put some pants on!”

“Why?”

“Because I’m your brother and it’s gross.”

“Don’t look then.”

If he’s messing with Sam he’s doing it with a perfect poker face. He just sounds a little bemused, like Sam’s the weirdo for wandering about wearing clothes.

“It’s really hard to not look.”

“Dude, _that’s_ weird.”

Sam doesn’t let himself throw his hands in the air and walk away. If this is just to mess with him, then that’ll be exactly what Dean wants. Instead he shrugs and goes to grab something to eat from the fruit bowl. Pointedly ignoring the bananas.

 

*

 

Dean’s thinking about Metatron, not for the first time since he got back. He knows he’s been taken care of, that he isn’t a problem. He also knows that he isn’t dead. It doesn’t sit right, not after everything that he’s done. This whole big mess is his fault. The angels, Cas falling and taking on an irradiated grace, Dean literally dying— even if he did come back.

He feels that anger starting to lick at the base of his spine and he tries to tamp it down. Think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts. He grabs at the bottle of beer on the table next to him— because the booze police won’t let him drink hard liquor anymore— and drops it with a loud smash.

The hand that he’s holding out isn’t his. It’s darker, scaled and with thick, black claws. He looks at it, stunned, for a bit. Flexes and contracts the fingers.

“Dean?” Cas sounds worried. As well he should be if Dean’s sprouting fucking dragon claws. “Dean what are you doing?”

“Looking at my hand.”

“I can see that. Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not really.”

“I have claws.”

He lifts his other hand, still normal, and digs a claw into his palm. Funny. It doesn’t feel sharp. It feels like a normal fingernail. He closes his eyes and shakes his head violently. Opens them again and both his hands are ordinary again.

“Dean?”

He forces out a laugh. “Can’t believe you fell for that, Cas.”

Cas doesn’t look convinced, but Dean beats a hasty retreat before he can say anything much about it.

It happens more after that, takes him by surprise. He gets angry and he can feel his teeth lengthening into bear fangs, jutting out so far that they should be cutting his lips. He feels an itch at his tailbone and shoulder blades, where stubbly wings and a thick curved tail are starting to force their way out through his skin. He sees tufts of hair falling to the ground, pushed out to make way for rough horns. He feels them all, and if he’s standing in front of a mirror he can see them, but then he sweeps his hand up to touch them and they’re gone.

Increasingly when Cas is in the room he can feel a handprint shaped itch in his shoulder. He knows if he looks at it he’ll see bright red flesh, raised like a burn, with the faint blue tinge of grace flickering underneath it. He doesn’t look, though.

Sam and Cas are starting to notice, they must do. He keeps expecting his horns to snag on doorways and lights, ducks his head where he doesn’t need to. He tries to pick things up with his long clawed fingers and ends up missing because his hands are smaller than they feel.

He sees them whispering between themselves, sneaking little glances at him and returning to their hurried conversation. He hears them talking in other rooms and when he comes in everything goes quiet and awkward. He knows what’s going on, and he doesn’t like it. He wants it to stop.

 

*

 

Sam’s praying again. Cas can only hear fragments of it— odd words here and there that don’t make much sense regardless of how he tries to fit them together. He thinks maybe Sam is too fraught to pray in coherent sentences right now, which would make what he’s hearing only fragments of fragments. He’s getting the tone, though. The emotion invested in each word. Fear, hurt, anger, relief. Sam’s cycling through the gamut.

It’s hard, they know. Things could be worse. Dean could have gone full demon, torn them to shreds and left. That doesn’t make it easy having him half here. Half himself. It’s getting harder to look at him as anything other than a Dean shaped landmine. Might never go off, might explode for no reason at all.

Cas understands why Sam prays. He just wishes he thought it’d make any kind of difference.

 

*

 

Dean has gained a new power. He discovered it by accident. He was busy flicking his shades on and off to freak out and annoy Sam when he happened to look towards the devil’s trap by the door. It was glowing, even under the carpet they’d slung there to stop him getting mad at the sight of it.

He’s careful not to let on, but after Sam and Cas go to bed he wanders over and examines it carefully. It glows in a gradient of near black to blinding white. It takes Dean almost all night to work out what the colors mean. They’re a gauge of the trap’s strength. Bright white where it’s at its strongest, getting darker and darker the weaker that particular section is. Say a slightly misshapen symbol or wonky line. He’s endlessly fascinated, wants to sit down and see if he can unravel a trap by picking at its weakest thread.

He restrains himself, for now. Sam and Cas don’t trust him as it is. If they find out he might be able to unpick devil’s traps then they’ll chain him down in the basement for sure. He’s not going to forfeit the pathetic amount of freedom he has left just to satisfy his curiosity.

He idly wonders whether this is a talent all demons share. It seems unlikely. They’ve caught plenty of demons with hidden traps— surely it’d be harder if they could all do this. Maybe this skill is all Dean. Maybe it comes from his familiarity with the things in life— maybe all demons get a power based on their mortal exploits. Or maybe he’s just special.

 

*

 

Sam is suffering from a vicious case of be careful what you wish for. He’s been wishing Dean would please god wear some form of underwear, and this morning that wish has been granted. This morning Dean comes out of his room wearing lacy hot pink lingerie and nothing else. It leaves precisely nothing to the imagination, and is somehow infinitely worse than when he was going commando.

When Dean was ambling about the place fully naked it was possible for Sam to just avert his gaze, but now. The thing is bright pink and it keeps catching his eye and that is something no-one wants to see on their big brother. Getting over hell is going to look easy compared to the years of therapy this is going to earn him.

And then Cas makes matters worse by entering the room, gaping, popping a boner and running out again. He’s practically family, and now Sam has seen him _literally_ get a boner over his brother and if this wasn’t so fucking mentally scarring, it’d be perfect teasing material. But it’s something he never ever, ever wants to revisit.

“What’s up with him?” Dean asks, with his best guileless face. The one that means he knows exactly what he’s doing.

“Put some jeans on, Dean.”

“Can’t a man express himself in the comfort of his own home?” He pouts.

“Where did you even ge— no wait. I don’t want to know; don’t fucking tell me.”

Sam’s life sucks. Titanically.


	8. You Take the Human Being and You Twist it All About

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from the Adrian Mitchell poem, _[To Whom it May Concern](http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/13605/auto/0/TO-WHOM-IT-MAY-CONCERN-TELL-ME-LIES-ABOUT-VIETNAM)_

Dean is standing outside Cas’s open door and he doesn’t know how he got here. He remembers running out of beer, he remembers crouching down by the devil’s trap at the main entrance and examining its threads. He remembers Sam warning him not to try and scrub the paint out. He remembers Sam threatening to cuff him and he remembers the anger building. He remembers the feeling of hellfire sparking and sputtering in the pits of his lungs. Each inhale stoking up the fire until he knew that if he took a deep enough breath the flames would blaze up and out of his mouth. And then he remembers nothing.

He’s standing in front of the devil’s trap, booted toe just nudging at the threshold. The light is behind him and it casts his shadow, colossal and mutated, into the open door of the room, over Cas’s sleeping form. Bat wings arch over his spined head, a whip-like tail winds lazily back and forth. His great, clawed hand is reaching up, stroking its two-dimensional form over Cas’s face almost tenderly before it makes a crushing motion that would have turned his head into so much pulpy mush if the hand had been corporeal.

He looks down, sees his own hand outstretched, acting without his consent, and tries to draw it back. It won’t come. It stays there, squeezing the juices out of Cas’s mangled cranium before releasing with a flourish that would’ve flicked his blood and brains all over the walls.

Dean’s mouth opens and he tries to shut it again, battles against his own tense muscles.

“Mine.”

Then control of his body is returned to him and he collapses, shaking.

He doesn’t stay there for long. Doesn’t know how to explain this should Cas wake up. He runs to the bathroom and strips completely naked in front of the mirror, eyes and fingers tracking over every inch of his flesh, looking for something to tell him what just happened. He doesn’t see any claws or scales. He does see his anti-possession tattoo, though. He hasn’t looked at it since he got back, hasn’t had much occasion to take his shirt off in front of a mirror now that he doesn’t need to shower or anything.

So he doesn’t know how long it’s been blurry for. The lines of the star starting to run into each other, the flames around them looking a little less sharp and a little more rounded. It’s not unsalvageable, should still be doing something. It stops demons getting in; that should mean it also slows them down if they’re _already_ inside, right, weakens that demonized core of his soul and stops it from growing, taking over entirely.

How much longer it might be doing that for, well, that’s debatable. There’s every chance that this is a side effect of death. His decaying tissue messed with his ink a bit, no harm done. Of course, there’s also a chance that his ink started out fine. That it’s been fading for some other reason. Like a concerted demonic assault from the inside.

He pulls his clothes back on and relocates to the sofa where he spends the rest of the nighttime hours trying not to catch sight of his shadow.

 

*

 

Dean has a new habit. With increasing frequency he’ll break off from whatever he’s doing and reach down to a blank space on the floor. He’ll stay there for a few seconds, concentrating, and then a blue feather will appear, pinched between his fingers. They’re never healthy looking. All of them are ragged and scorched black at the tip.

When he straightens up from the living room floor this time, the feather he’s holding is coated in foul looking, yellowish bile. He grimaces at it and then flicks it at Cas, who bats it away.

“You wanna tidy up your gross fucking molt feathers, Cas?”

“They don’t even exist on this plane until you force them to, Dean. Leave well enough alone.”

“I can sense them and it’s gross. Take an interdimensional fucking shower or something. Dying’s no excuse for smelling like rotten meat.”

“You don’t have to be cruel.”

“Uh. Demon.”

“You can’t just keep using that as an excuse, you ass.”

“Oh yes I fucking well can, you just watch me.”

Sam watches as they bicker back and forth. He and Cas have very different ways of dealing with Dean. Sam usually just ignores him until he gets bored and goes away. Cas, meanwhile, has a tendency to rise to every bit of bait that’s flung at him. Whatever. If Cas wants to expend his dying energy fighting with Dean then who is Sam to stop him. Maybe it’s like picking at a scab. You know it hurts, and you know it’s bad for you, but it’s just so fucking tempting.

Cas breaks off and starts coughing, great, hacking, burbling coughs. He sounds like he’s dying. And, now that Sam looks at him properly, he looks like it too. He hadn’t really noticed it before, maybe because it’s been happening gradually and right under his eyes.

The bags under Cas’s eyes are so deep they’re starting to look like bruises and whatever he’s eating, it clearly isn’t enough. He’s gone from lean and lithe to atrophied and taught. He has a skeletal look about him now, a fragile gangliness emphasized by jutting out bones and lack of flesh. He shouldn’t be sitting at a table shouting at Dean, he should be lying in bed, attached to a drip as his friends and family gather around and give him gifts and sympathetic words.

And that feeling comes with a sucker punch of guilt. Because Cas should be their main concern right now. He’s falling to pieces in front of their eyes, and instead of trying to find a way to fix that they’ve just allowed him to stick himself by the wayside. They took his immediate problem and sacrificed it at the altar of something that took months to develop. Months which could have been spent finding a solution instead of just waiting.

“Sam?” Cas cuts into his reverie and he blinks, startled. He must have zoned out for a while ‘cause now they’re the only two in the room.

“Yeah.”

“Did you want something?”

“Oh, sorry. No.”

“You look concerned. Is it about Dean?”

“No. Are, are you okay, Cas?”

Cas huffs out a breath.

“Not really, but I’m still here.”

“You don’t look like you should be on your feet.”

“I look worse than I feel.”

“If you felt how you looked you’d be scraping death.”

Cas shrugs.

“We should have been helping you. We’ve just been sitti—”

“Don’t. Sam.” His tone holds no bite, just intense weariness. “I made my choice. I came back to help Dean, make sure you were okay. Not to heap my problems on you.”

“Don’t be like that, you’re family, Cas. Your problems are always our problems.”

“Yes, well. I’ve accepted my fate; I don’t desire your help or your pity.”

Sam grimaces at his barbed tone, but lets it slide.

“You don’t think there’s any hope for Dean, do you? You think he’s going to become a demon and I’m going to have to kill him.”

Cas blinks, surprised at the sudden change in topic.

“What makes you say that?

“Because if you thought he had a way out you’d be searching for one for yourself too.”

“Contrary to yours and his belief, my life does not center on Dean Winchester.”

“Maybe not, but you do love him.”

“I love a lot of people. You, my brothers and sisters.”

“You love Dean differently, though.”

“Does it matter?”

“Is that why you’re so determined to die? So you can be gone before he is? So you don’t have to see him turn into a proper demon, see him killed?”

“I’m tired, Sam. Please.”

“Please what, Cas?”

“Please just let it go.”

Cas uses the table to push himself to his feet and Sam can see the shake in his elbows and thighs. He kicks himself for not noticing sooner and rushes over to help. Cas slaps his hand away and makes his way back to his room unassisted.

“I’m not dead yet.” He throws over his shoulder, and then shuts the door with a damning click.

 

*

 

Dean saunters into the living room and Sam, stung by his conversation with Cas, takes the time to really look at him. Which is hard, because he’s still wearing lingerie. Although at least it’s with a t-shirt this time. He’s been paying close attention to Dean’s behavior, watching carefully for every little change and unusual act, but he hasn’t really been paying any attention to his appearance.

Dean looks younger. He’s still got the same wrinkles and crow’s feet, but the frowns are gone. So too is the pinched look and the defensively squared shoulders of someone who’s so used to being crushed under the weight of their past that they just accept it. Now it’s easy smiles and laughs. The smooth, sinuous glide of the carefree.

Sam hates it. He hates it because it’s false, because when they cure Dean it’s going to be gone.

This new version of Dean has pulled down all of the walls that his brother built up so carefully over the years. And that’s fine now, when he has enough demon in him not to really care about what’s been hiding behind there. But Sam isn’t Cas, dying and full of despair for himself and everyone around him. Sam is certain that they’ll find a way to cure Dean, and when they do all this _junk_ , all this unresolved trauma and shuttered down, ignored pain, it’s going to have nothing to hold it back and it’s going to cut through Dean like hot piss through snow.

It almost makes him want to hold back, agree with Dean and just leave him be. And then he sees the wild eyed glaze to him as he bounces around the room, constantly on his feet. The way his fingers won’t stay still, beating a tattoo on the handle of the dinner knife that Sam would think he’d just absently picked up if he hadn’t seen him with one in his hand yesterday and the day before too.

He looks like Sam used to, when he was on demon blood, when he was getting itchy with withdrawal, trying to alleviate the symptoms without clueing anyone around him that there was a problem.

 

*

 

Dean decides he has a problem about the same time Sam starts confiscating the kitchen knives. He hadn’t even noticed what he was doing, not until a rough cough brought him back to himself.

“Looking for something?” Sam asks from behind him.

“Uh—” He doesn’t have an answer. He’s not sure what he’s even doing here. He was in the living room, now suddenly he’s got his paws in one of the kitchen drawers. He whacks it shut and turns around to see Sam with a handful of gleaming silver cutlery.

“I’ve got the knives.”

“I can see that. Why?”

“Because I haven’t seen you without one in your hand for at least four days.”

Dean frowns.

“Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight…” He draws it out, all bored incredulity.

“You had one less than ten minutes ago, you were rolling it between your fingers like a pen while you were watching TV. I snatched it off you when you weren’t paying attention and then you came in here.”

“Yeah, very funny.”

“I’m not joking.”

“Whatever.”

“Dean, we need to talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. It’s just fucking cutlery!”

This is bullshit. If he wanted weapons all he’d have to do is pick up one of the razor sharp samurai display swords. What the fuck could he even do with a blunt dinner knife? This isn’t about him being out of control or acting up. This is Sam just itching for an excuse to throw him in cuffs and back in that trap. He threatened to do it before. Would have too if Dean hadn’t backed down.

Dean doesn’t want to let him do this, but it’s not like he has much of a fucking choice. He’s stuck here at the whim and mercy of two people who talk about him and whisper behind his back and fuck them. He has to stay here, that doesn’t mean he has to deal with their fucking bullshit.

He shoulders past Sam and into his room, slamming and locking the door. He wishes Sam would try and burst in, give him an honest to god excuse to knock his fucking lights out. He can’t start anything, can’t do anything because it’s all just a fucking sign that he’s turning.

Dean has a problem. And it isn’t anything to do with a newfound fondness for knives.

 

*

 

Dean has plans for today, fun plans that mainly involved making his brother grossly uncomfortable and sexually frustrating Cas, but they’re forgotten as soon as he comes out of his room and sees what Sam has done.

He hasn’t removed all the weapons from the bunker. That would be too subtle. That wouldn’t _jar_ enough. What he’s done is he’s gone around with a can of spray paint and scrawled devil’s traps either on or under all of them. Dean is livid. Not quite as livid as when Cas and Sam painted traps outside their rooms, in a clear display of fuck you, I think you’re going to kill me in my sleep— never mind that a month and a bit later Dean’s shadow may or may not have tried to do just that to Cas. But he’s livid none the less.

He wants to break Sam’s ridiculously elongated fucking _spine_. He wants to take his other arm and snap it clean off so that he’ll never be able to spray another trap and keep Dean away from the things he wants to touch again. The Mark burns on his arm, bloodlust roiling thick and hot under his skin and he’s been trying to keep it down, keep himself under control and this is the repayment he gets. They trust him so little they might as well sling him into the dungeon. They better because he’s going to fucking rip them to shreds.

“Hello, Dean.”

He swings round, teeth bared.

“Sam shouldn’t have done this.”

It’s so much the opposite of what Dean was expecting that it douses the fires a little.

“Devil’s traps make you angry. This can’t be helping.”

“Damn right it isn’t.” He grits out. “I’m trying, but this.” He gestures, teeth clenched.

“Can I do anything to help?”

“You can fuckin’ trust me.”

“I do.”

“Yeah, the trap outside your door makes that real clear.”

“I didn’t want you masturbating in my room again.”

“You could have just locked your door.”

“I did. You picked it.”

Dean shrugs.

“Would it help if I told you he didn’t trap the cooking knives?”

“You sure you want to tell me stuff like this when I’m pissed?”

“I know you won’t hurt Sam.”

“You’re gonna regret those words in a couple hours.”

Cas shrugs and steps aside to let him go. He thinks Dean doesn’t see the carefully calculating eyes that follow him out the room, seeing if he’ll make a line straight for the kitchen and those promised knives. He can practically smell the lack of trust coming off Cas, knows he’s just bullshitting because he’s weak, because he knows if Dean gets too angry he could snap him into pieces. He wouldn’t even need demon strength. Never mind a stiff wind; Cas looks like a fucking sneeze would blow him over.

Dean has to be real fucking careful traversing the bunker now. Last thing he wants to do is snag his foot in a trap and get stuck. Is that even how they work, or does his whole body have to go in? Whatever, he’s not finding that one out the hard way.

He dicks around the bunker for the rest of the day, trying not to let the low level anger simmering away inside get too obvious. By the time he volunteers to cook dinner that night, a sign Sam seems to take as a good one— he usually only cooks when he’s relaxed, things seem relatively normal.

Until Sam _volunteer_ s to do all the cutting and chopping.

“You do know that’s like 90% of the work, right?”

“I want to help.”

“Dude, if you wanted to cook you just had to say so, I’ll go sit down.”

He’s trying to edge Sam out without directly confronting him— because he knows exactly how that’s likely to go. Not only will he end up not cutting the vegetables he’ll never be allowed to again. And okay, it’s weird to be trying to subtly maneuver himself into a position where he gets to do chores instead of the other way around, but it’s a matter of principle. And a little bit a matter of that fucking itching beneath his skin. He’s not going to kill anyone, but if some chicken carcass gets chopped up a little more viciously than normal really no-one’s losing out. The fucking thing’s dead already.

He throws himself back onto the sofa and does a quick flick through the TV to find the most violent film he can, more to needle Sam than because he gives a shit what they watch, and waits. He can practically see Sam standing there, a throwback to all his lawyerly shit, weighing up the pros and cons of each course of action and finally deciding, fuck it, let’s give the potential homicidal maniac access to the knives. Maybe it’ll be therapeutic.

“You’re not getting out of it that easily, jerk. What were you planning?”

Dean shrugs, throws out “have to see what we’ve got” and then makes his way into the kitchen. Sam follows, under the pretense of getting a beer. For the so called smart one he’s painfully fucking transparent. Or maybe he’s doing it deliberately to let Dean know he’s gonna be standing over and watching him. Fucking hell. He can’t stand another goddamn moment in this stupid fucking bunker with someone always over his shoulder watching for the slightest misstep.

There’s steak in the fridge. Good. He’s in a bloody, red meat mood. Not that he needs to eat, but fuck it, for steak he’ll make an exception. He grabs it, gathers the ingredients for two sides of fries and whatever crappy salad Sam’s going to want and throws together a quick paprika seasoning for the meat. After that he stops, makes a show of looking for something.

“Dude, where are the cooking knives?”

“Oh, uh..” Sam at least has the grace to look flustered as he digs them out from the ass end of some cupboard they never use.

Dean takes the biggest one with a flourish. Oh, but it feels good. It settles, right there in his palm, like that’s where it needs to be now and forever.

“You, uh, want a moment alone with that?”

Sam’s voice snaps him back and he shoots him his best _I fucking got you didn’t I_ grin. He gives the knife a few theatrical flourishes and then uses it to peel the potatoes. He could just use a peeler, would waste less that way too, but it’s worth it to see Sam’s eyes track his movements.

He finishes peeling and slices down into the first potato. It feels strange. Wrong. It doesn’t have the right amount of give, too firm and solid. It should be fleshier, wetter too. He should slice down and thick red should gush out. The weapon in his hand suddenly feels all wrong too. It’s modern and polished where it should be bigger, rough and hewn. This isn’t his Blade, isn’t right. Where’s his Blade? They took it from him. Why did they do that— why did he let them?

It hasn’t tasted blood for months. Not since he fought with Metatron. _Metatron_. The name resounds through his body like a broken prayer, filling up all the vacuum space he’s been keeping inside himself, using to try and smother the fire in his gut. That name is kerosene, sparking him alight and suddenly he’s not Dean anymore, he’s a thing of righteous fury and rage.

He’s back in that warehouse, but he’s not stupid, ordinary, not good enough Dean. He’s him. This him, and he’s pushing Metatron back with each perfectly placed slash of his Blade. He can see the angel pulsing, like a devil’s trap, can see the dark spots he needs to stab at to let all that grace leak out and disintegrate to nothing, see the burning bright pulses that show him exactly where and how Metatron is going to move next. And this time it isn’t Dean who falls, is taunted and lies bleeding on the floor. This time it’s the scribe of God hemorrhaging out into the dust, his corrupted holy light fighting to be free of his body, punching out of his wounds and into nothingness.

Dean stabs at him, again and again, roaring with righteous fury. He feels that itch burning deep inside and this isn’t alleviating it, nothing is alleviating it. He knows in that brief instant that this is not enough, that nothing will ever be enough. He’s going to carve a bloody swathe through the massed ranks of his enemies and they will not be able to stand before him. He is fury, he is wrath incarnate, he is the meeting of the divine and the demonic and he, Dean Winchester, the Righteous Man, the Knight of Hell, is going to wipe the world clean with blood and guts and the screams of the dying.


	9. Did You Trust to the Mercy of the Night?

“DEAN!”

Hands grab at him and he fights back for a moment before blinding pain erupts across his face and chest. He howls, flicking open eyes he hadn’t even realized were closed. The illusion snaps. He’s in the bunker and there’s a knife, dropped on a counter from which great gouges have been torn.

“Get him downstairs.” Cas’s words throw him into a fit of rage and panic. This isn’t another fugue state, though. This is fury he’s very much aware for as Sam carries him downstairs, Cas repeatedly flicking holy water over him to stop him from breaking free. They get him strapped down and manacled and although his fury has settled into something harder and colder he still plays at raging. He screams and rattles his chains, following the pattern they described to him from the last time he lost control.

They take it in turns to sit there and watch. Sam seems to find it harder than Cas, maybe because Cas has seen this all before. It’s a little harder to play rabid when he’s manacled, but he manages to turn the table and chair into so much kindling, actually taking a perverse joy in ripping them into shreds. He hurls the pieces out at Sam with enough accuracy that by the time Cas comes to take over his shift, he’s bruised and even bleeding in a few places.

Dean lets himself appear to calm down gradually. It’s easier when his eyes are black, so much harder to tell what he’s thinking or where he’s aiming his gaze.  He even lets the episode carry on for a little longer this time, because they’ll be expecting him to be more tainted, more demonic.

He’s tempted to do the Hollywood, human up his eyes and croak out Sam’s name in a bewildered fashion, but he doesn’t. Instead he coughs, great and hacking, like he’s wanted to for nearly an entire day. When that gains no reaction he yanks at the chains binding him, shouts out in surprise.

“What the hell?”

“Dean?”

Sam darts up to his feet, coming near the trap but not quite to the edge— he’s learned that lesson. Dean blinks at him as if confused and then flicks off his shades.

“What did I do?”

“Dean—”

_Quit your fucking gawking and let me OUT_

“You wouldn’t put me in here for no reason. What did I do?”

_Like you haven’t been looking for an excuse since day one_

“You went postal on a potato.”

_You’re going to be next_

“Ha-fucking-ha. What did I do?”

_This is nothing you just wait_

“I’m not messing with you. You were making dinner and then suddenly you went psycho, black eyes, stabbing at something. Ruined the counter.”

_I wish it had been you_

“Did I hurt anyone?”

“No, but you were out of control. We had to restrain you.”

“You’re bruised.”

_Those bruises are going to be the least of your worries Sammy dearest_

“Oh.” He laughs, but it’s a nervous laugh. “You shredded the furniture and threw it at me.”

“Should’a seen that one coming, Sam.”

_If hadn’t needed you alive I would have put one through your heart_

“Yeah.”

“So, um. We’re gonna have to leave you in here for a bit.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And after that—”

“After that, someone needs to get Crowley.”

_He thinks he can control me too and I’m gonna fucking eat him if I see him again_

“What?”

“We can’t carry on like this.”

“No.”

“So we get my soul back.”

“You said you didn’t want to before, that you were fine.”

 _I_ am _fine for the first time in my fucking life you overgrown sack of shit_

“Yeah, and that was before I started going AWOL from my own life. You think I like checking out and waking up in a devil’s trap with no idea how or why?”

“Fair point.”

There’s silence for a moment. Sam’s about to go and get Cas when Dean speaks.

“Um, I know I’ve gotta stay in here for a while, but is there any way we could not with the manacles?”

_Just a little closer let me grab hold of that other arm we’ll see what the insides of your bones are made of while I suck them dry_

“Dean. I’m still not sure we’re even going to let you out again this time. Cas thinks we shouldn’t.”

“Dude. No. You can’t go after Crowley without me. He’ll shred you.”

“Yeah, but we’re not really sure we can go with you like this, either.”

_Fuck fuck fuck fuck you better let me out of this trap I have big fucking plans you think you can keep me here I’ll pull the walls down around us and dance in the rubble_

 

*

 

“We _cannot_ let him out.”

“We have to.”

“No, we don’t.”

“You were the one who said we needed to do something, try and get Crowley.”

“Too late.” Cas tries to snarl but devolves into coughs. “Even if we trust that he’s still Dean, and that’s a gargantuan if, he went into a fugue state just cutting vegetables. You want to throw him into a real fight, see how he fares?” He barely manages to force the last few words out, gasping and panting for breath.

Cas doesn’t say I told you so, but he doesn’t need to. The words hang there in the air between them, oozing blame out in all directions. Sam might have ignored Cas’s advice, but Cas gave up pretty easily, could have pushed harder.

“We don’t have any other choice.” Sam’s words expand to fill the silence.

“We can try and cure him.” Cas offers after a few beats.

“Are we just going to have this same argument again?” Sam snaps.

“Until we resolve it, yes.”

“I won’t let you cure him.”

“We don’t have a choice, Sam.”

There’s no bite or passion to Cas’s words. He sounds tired and fed up. Sam knows he’s won this argument before they’ve even really started it. It’s a matter of wearing Cas down, and he’s down to tracing paper skin and flayed bones already.

“I’m sorry, but you can’t stop me. This is the only way. Dean is coming with me to get his soul back.”

“I can’t let you do that, Sam.”

“Cas, please. I don’t want to fight you.”

Cas shuffles his way in front of the door to the basement. He manifests his angel blade and the effort folds him over, hacking up a splatter of bloody phlegm.

“Cas. Please.”

He straightens as best he can, leaning heavily against the doorframe and pointing his blade at Sam.

“Do..not..do…this.”

“I’m sorry, Cas.”

Sam knocks the blade out of his hand easily and dodges Cas’s feeble punch. He responds in kind, wincing as his hand makes a connection with Cas’s head. It’s a weak blow, trying as he is to straddle the line between knocking him out and killing him. Sam catches him as he goes down, carrying him as gently as possible into his room. Cas’s bones dig into his arms, sharp and as brittle as chalk.

Sam takes a deep breath, steeling himself, and then he descends to the basement.

 

*

 

“Sammy.”

“Dean.”

“Everything okay?”

“I’m going after Crowley.”

“Who’re you taking with you— Charlie? Or did you tap the hunter network?”

“No. I’m taking you.”

“Oh.” He blinks, startled. “I thought you decided that was a bad idea?”

“Yeah, but it’s still the best I’ve got.”

“Cas okay with it?”

“No. He tried to stand guard outside the door. I had to knock him out.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“You think he’ll be okay?”

Sam shrugs. He’s still loitering at the edge of the room, not quite able to make that final leap and spring Dean out.

“Having doubts, huh?” Dean guesses.

“Something Cas said. You flipped out cutting a potato—what’ll a real fight do to you?”

“I wouldn’t hurt you. No way.”

Sam hmms a vague agreement.

“Anyway, and not that it’ll mean much coming from me, but I feel calm now. It’s like each outburst taps the anger and gets rid of it for a bit.”

“That’s not a healthy coping mechanism.”

Dean huffs a laugh.

“Yeah, but I won’t have to use it much longer.”

It’s the way he says it, the little smile he gives Sam. The look of unwavering faith. He doesn’t look like a demon, or a man tainted by the Mark of Cain. He just looks like a younger version of Dean. All smiles and eager trust.

Sam steps forward, carves a line through the smooth concrete of the devils trap on the floor. He waits a beat for any sign or reaction from Dean, anything to indicate he’s about to turn, and, seeing nothing, he unlocks the manacles. Dean pulls Sam into a bear hug, crushingly tight around his ribs. Sam opens his mouth to make some lame joke about not killing his only chance of salvation, and then the world turns.

Dean digs his ragged nails into Sam’s bad arm, gouging at the wound until he roars in pain. He’s toppled, back slamming down against the concrete with a sharp slap and suddenly Dean’s kneeling over him, pinning him easily with his demonic strength. He slips a knife out of Sam’s belt and carves a thin line across his own hand, holding it, cupped, over Sam’s head so that the blood wells in the dip of his palm.

“Big mistake, Sammy.”

“What the hell, Dean?”

“I wouldn’t be so quick to talk there, kiddo. This is demon blood here. Remember the fun you used to have with it? I can promise you this stuff is so much more potent than Ruby’s. You thought coming down off hers was bad, this stuff is fresh Knight of Hell. This is the fucking heroin to her aspirin.”

Sam’s mouth tightens into a pursed, white line.

“Yeah, that’s more like it.  Now, listen carefully. You’re going to call Cas.” Sam starts to grunt a protest but Dean presses the clean edge of the knife against his lips and shushes him. “I know, I know, you knocked him out. So if he doesn’t answer first time we’re just going to keep on shouting until he does. Okay?”

He pauses for a moment to make sure Sam’s following and then he carries on.

“He’s going to get my Blade from wherever you two have hidden it and then he’s going to break the devil’s trap to the garage, and any that are in or around Baby, and I’m going to get in my car and drive away, and neither of you are going to follow me. Okay? And if you don’t do any of it, or you do something slightly wrong, I’m going to hold your nose until your fat, lying mouth opens and I’m going to tip all this hot,  fresh demon blood in. How’s about that, Sammy?”

Sam doesn’t respond so Dean tips his hand just enough that a small drop escapes. It lands on his chin.

“Oops. Missed that time. Won’t again.”

Sam starts struggling, like he can possibly do anything to escape. Dean drops the knife and grabs his jaw with his free hand, holding it still with ease. He squeezes until the pressure pops Sam’s mouth open, takes a small bit of pleasure in the bones grinding beneath his touch.

“You’re not behaving like someone who wants to stay free and clean, Sammy. You’re behaving like someone jonesin’ for a fix.”

“Hungph”

Dean uses his grip on Sam’s head to roll it side to side as he leans in closer and coos at him like a young, stupid child.

“Are you gonna do what I want, or does this have to get ugly?”

He relaxes his grip enough that Sam can speak.

“Why?”

“Oh don’t be dumb. I’m not going to have a melodramatic, tearful conversation with you. I’m fed up of all this so I’m going AWOL. Nothing personal. Well. A little bit personal.

“Now, how is this going to go? Easy way or hard way?”

“Stop it, Dean.”

Dean looks up at Cas with a feral grin. And it really is feral. He’s crouched over Sam like he’s about to tear out his throat, eyes black and teeth bared.

“Nice of you to join us. How’s the head?”

“Fine. Let Sam up.”

“No. And don’t even think about trying to exorcise me. It hurts, but not enough to stop me getting this down his throat.”

“Demon blood?” Cas hedges.

“Dingdingding, got it in one.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“See, this is why I’m leaving. First it was telling me what I can do, what I can’t do. Now you’re telling me what’s in my head as well.”

Cas takes a step forward and Dean lifts a hand up to stop him.

“Uh-uh. Don’t think I won’t snap your spine, ‘cause I will, and I won’t even break a sweat doing it.”

He transfers the hand back to Sam’s jaw, opening and shutting it a few times like a gaping fish. Partly messing about, partly reminding the other two of the absolute control he has over the situation.

“So, Cas, did you hear the demands, or are we going to have to go over this again?”

“You want a way out, I assume.”

“Don’t forget my Blade, darling.” He pulls a face. “Ooh, no. That doesn’t suit you at all.”

“The First Blade and a way out. Is that all?”

“And the Impala.”

“And if I give you those, you’ll not hurt Sam?”

“On my honor.” He grins.

“Dean—”

“Okay, okay. Look. I won’t kill either of you unless you force me to. Good enough?”

“Not really.”

“Tough.”

Dean starts to tip his hand.

“Stop. I’ll get the Blade.”

“And b—”

“Yes, yes. I’ll break the traps.”

“You have three minutes to get me my Blade and get back here. Any sign of hunters or angels or anything else, Sam starts chasing dragons.”

“And if I told you the Blade was more than three minutes away?”

“You’d be lying. I can sense it, I just can’t find it.”

Cas doesn’t bother trying to trick him. He fetches the weapon and returns as quickly as he can. Which isn’t particularly quickly.

“You were three seconds over. Lucky I was feeling charitable. Now, slip that baby into my waistband and go break a few devil’s traps, there’s a good celestial being.”

Dean could break them himself. He’s been practicing, but he doesn’t want to reveal his new skill set.

“Dean.”

“Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean. Don’t you ever get bored of repeating yourself? C’mon. Don’t make me impose another arbitrary time restriction on you.”

Cas grits his teeth and does as he’s told, tucking the weapon in and backing up and out of the doorway. Dean flicks the blood from his cut hand and then delivers Sam a solid punch to the head. As he lolls back, unconscious, Dean draws the Blade and slices a shallow line across Sam’s hand. He dips his fingers in the blood welling forth and uses it to quickly draw something on his own left forearm. Insurance. When that’s done Dean locks Sam carefully inside the demon cuffs.  They won’t hold him for long once he’s awake, but they’ll give Dean time enough to get away.

Before Cas can do something stupid like mutter out an exorcism, Dean shows him the tiny angel banishing sigil drawn in human blood on his arm.

“You try anything and you’re gone.”

“I’d die. You know that.”

“Yup.”

Cas nods. He’s not going to try anything. All he’d achieve trying to stop Dean now is an even more futile death than the one that’s already lined up for him. Sam will need his help to get out of those handcuffs, to get Dean back. He might not be able to fight, but he can still think and track. He’s not dead yet, as he’s so fond of telling Sam.

He breaks the devil’s trap at the entrance to the garage and the one on the Impala’s trunk and then he watches Dean drive away. He expects to feel something: disappointment, anger, fury. He feels nothing but a sense of dumb inevitability. 


	10. Friends in Low Places

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please don't hate me

Everything is motherfucking perfect. Well. Almost.

“I’m sorry, Baby.” Dean croons, as he strokes her steering wheel. “This is gonna hurt.”

He guns the engine, getting her up to top speed and then he yanks the wheel around, launching the car into a ditch. For a brief second she flies, and then she lands with a scream of shattered glass and crunching metal. Dean climbs his way out carefully, shrugging the shrapnel out of his flesh and healing the wounds left behind.

He stretches out, quietly mourns the loss of his iPod, resolves to steal himself another one as soon as possible and then wanders off into the distance, singing under his breath as he goes.

“Livin' eeeeeeasy

Lurrvin' free

Season ticket on a one waaaaaay ride

Askin' nothin'

Leave me beeeee…”

And okay, he didn’t need to crash the car. He could have just dumped her somewhere, but that’s not the point. To quote the Joker, “it’s about sending a message _._ ” Old Dean, he couldn’t have done this if his life depended on it. New Dean, he did it just to prove a point. Your version of Dean is gone, don’t try and get him back.

He walks about a half mile through some woods, has a bit of a fight with a bear. Well, fight is maybe an exaggeration. There’s some mutual growling on both sides, a brandishing of the Blade that just seems to make the bear pissed. It takes black eyes and an unearthly howl to get the thing to back off.

He walks for 6 hours and ends up in Concordia where he boosts some old hunk of junk. It’s a patchwork of colors, seems to be mostly held together with duct tape, and is the sort of vehicle that Dean Winchester, registered car snob, would never be seen dead in. Which is why it’s perfect.

He drives out west for a while, stopping at the next mid-sized town. He was planning on going further but the car radio is broken and he burned through the previous owner’s hideous fucking CD collection in about half an hour. Maroon 5 can lick his fucking ass, is all he has to say on that matter.

He picks up some decent CDs at a thrift store and carries on his journey in a slightly better mood. He has a goal in mind, but he wants a few days out on the open road first. He’d take a whole fucking month, a year even, but there are time pressures. He’s gone with the wind and he still has to stick to a fucking schedule. Bullshit. But at least this one is his choice. No more sitting and rotting, waiting to get chained to the wall.

He swings out in the complete wrong direction for two days, driving from dusk ‘til dawn with short breaks in between. He has to, because the world sucks and even though he’s a demon he still gets random itches, still gets stiff and uncomfortable sitting in the same position for hours on end, and most helpfully, his legs still cramp if he ignores the signs and tries to drive for too long without stopping. It takes a bit longer, mind, but it’s still a pain in the ass. He wonders idly if Abaddon ever suffered the indignity of having to slam on the brakes and practically fall out of a car because her legs had seized up without a word of fucking warning. Okay, with a lot of warning, but he ignored it because he thought, ha, I’m a demon. I’m not going to get cramp.

Famous. Last. Words.

He stops for the final time about an hour out of his destination and does a thorough sweep of his surroundings. He wants to make sure he hasn’t been followed. He hasn’t seen any sign of Sam or Cas, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t tailing him. They’ll certainly have been trying. He draws a blank and is about to triumphantly return to his little shit-heap when a voice stops him.

“Hello, Squirrel.”

“Crowley.” Dean acknowledges.

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“You said you’d be back for me.”

“You listen; it’s your greatest feature.”

“What do you want?”

“Just going to skip the foreplay?”

“I’m in a hurry.”

“I could tell by the way you spent two days driving in the other direction before you doubled back this way.”

“You’ve been following me.”

“I believe the phrase is ‘no duh’.”

“You didn’t tell Sam and Cas where I was heading, did you?”

“No. Their interests don’t happen to coincide with mine.”

“Good.”

“Surprised it took you so long to leave the nest.”

“Yeah, well, they trapped me in the bunker.”

“Awfully rude.”

Dean makes a noncommittal grunt.

“So, any reason you’re so close to the entrance to Heaven?

“I don’t—”

“Don’t even try it, Dean.” Crowley says in response to his _who me_ innocent tone.

“Yeah, okay. I’m going upstairs. Why’s it your business?”

“You’ll never get in.”

“Watch me.”

“The entrance is warded.”

“That’s not going to be a problem.”

“It doesn’t matter what petty larceny skills you think you have, you’re no match for angels.”

“I have a way with locks and seals. Trust me.”

“Assuming I thought you could succeed, what’s the plan? It’s Metatron you’re after, I presume.”

Dean tells him his plan. Crowley laughs, open and hearty.

“It’s bold, but you’ll never do it on your own. They’ll notice, send the host after you.”

“Not if someone arranges a distraction.”

“You want my help?”

“And you want mine, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“You want to make a deal?”

“I’m a demon, you can’t get me to sign one of your dumb contracts.”

“I’m not doing anything with you otherwise. Color me suspicious, but I don’t trust you.”

Dean shrugs.

“Help me or don’t. You think this is a suicide mission and you need me for something. That means your only two options are get me to do whatever it is before I raid Heaven— which you know I won’t, or you invest the time and expendable two bit demons to keep me kicking until I can repay you.”

Crowley grinds his teeth. He can see Dean’s point. Doesn’t mean he has to like it.

“And if I help you, you’ll do my favor?”

“Depends what it is.”

“So you want me to help you on the off chance that afterwards you fancy doing as you’re told?”

“Seems that way, doesn’t it.”

“Not good enough.”

“Fine. I’ll do it so long as it isn’t too apocalyptical and it doesn’t hurt Sam or Cas.”

“Still carrying a torch for them?”

Dean shrugs.

“Not very demonic of you.”

“I don’t think I’ve gone full demon, yet.”

Crowley’s black-eyed gaze sweeps over him

“Not _quite_ yet, no. How very dull of you.”

“So do we have a deal?”

“Let me just write up a—”

Dean slicks his eyes over, pulling up the full force of the darkness that he can feel writhing and twisting under his skin. The phantom form that has been escaping into his shadow and his waking dreams uncurls itself, towering over them both and grinning with jagged sword teeth. The predawn gloom sharpens, highlighting the crooked angles of Dean’s face and fire crackles deep within his lungs as he hisses out the words “Do. We. Have. A. Deal?”

“We do.”

“Excellent.”

Dean doesn’t bother to threaten vengeance on him if he doesn’t deliver. Crowley has just seen the specter of Dean’s true form, terrifying even though it’s still developing and solidifying as his humanity is burned away. That’s all the threat he needs.

 

*

 

There’s only one angel guarding the entrance to Heaven. Arrogant bastards.  He’s sitting on a bench trying to look unobtrusive and managing anything but. Dean’s amazed no one’s called the cops on him yet, sketchy dude hanging around a kids park. Probably some bullshit mojo thing the angels are pulling.

The Mark is practically vibrating on his arm, can sense imminent death. It wants him to take it slow, make the angel suffer and daub himself in his blood. Luckily Dean still has enough common sense left to know that if you’re trying to break in somewhere like Heaven you don’t take the time to dance naked in the blood of the massacred guard.

He comes up behind the angel, years of fighting alongside Cas leading him to expect a trick or a trap or some sort of struggle. Turns out he overestimated this guy. The Blade carves his head off in one clean slice. The angel slumps off the bench, dying in a crumpled heap on the ground. Dean looks for the charcoaled wings but is disappointed to see none. The guy was definitely an angel, flashing blue lights zipping back and forth under his skin. Huh. Maybe it’s something to do with that spell of Metatron’s, or maybe you have to kill them with one of their own blades.

Dean leaves the body and wanders over to the sandbox. Now he understands why they didn’t bother with more than one guard. The entrance is sealed shut. He can change that easily enough though. They’ve been lazy, left the framework of the sigil dug into the sand, just the finer, more intricate details to fill in. All Dean has to do is concentrate, trust to his new way with seals and sigils to guide him.

He’s been to Heaven before so it’s not too difficult to conjure up the feel of the place and really key in on it. It takes a few minutes, but eventually he gets it. There’s a wrenching in his gut, like he’s about to vomit up every meal he’s had in the past five years, and then he can see fuzzy black lines overlaid in the sand. He fills in the missing ones carefully, stepping back and preparing to fight as he finishes the seal.

A faint white glow appears where the last line meets the first and then spreads, like rainwater through a dry riverbed, until the whole thing is aglow. There’s a small shockwave that makes Dean’s bones ache, and then the entrance is open. He slips inside, thinking of Metatron and trusting to Heavenly logic to take him to wherever the scribe of God is imprisoned.

 

*

 

“Dean Winchester. Now this is a surprise.”

Dean ignores Metatron, concentrating instead on the cell door. Except he isn’t seeing a cell. He looks past it and to the spell itself, to the latticework of glowing threads that make it up, woven together and interconnecting. This is the bit that he’s going to have the problem with. His time dismantling and reforming devils traps in the bunker was good training, but he’s not sure they’ve been enough. They had maybe a hundred threads for him to manipulate and unravel. This spell has something close to tens of thousands.

“I could have sworn I killed you.” Metatron drawls.

Dean sits down, cross legged on the floor and begins the long and slow process of finding the first thread. Once he gets that it should be simple, a matter of unpicking it until the whole thing collapses. It’s finding it that’s going to be a bitch.

“Getting brought back from the dead really ruined my emotional set piece, you know that. There’s no point killing people off if they’re just going to spring back. Cheapens it.”

“Cram it. Do you want out of here or not?” Dean snaps.

“I don’t see how sitting on the floor staring at the door is going to help.”

“Shows what you know.”

Dean reaches forwards and plucks at a thread that only he can see. The air vibrates and Metatron steps back, startled.

“What are you doing?”

“What’s it look like, genius?”

The place where the first and last threads meet is the center point of the spell, and as such is technically its strongest point. In theory, this means it should have the brightest glow. Unfortunately this whole set up is pretty strong, no obvious flaws and very few subtle ones, so it’s hard to tell which is the one particular bit he needs. It’s blinding enough looking at it that Dean can’t actually see Metatron. Which is good, because just the sound of his voice is grating, if he could see him as well, Dean would probably flip and just try and stab the cage open.

Dean spends an increasingly frantic fifteen minutes looking for the first thread before he’s forced to resort to another method. He doesn’t know how long he has until the angels work out that someone has slipped past their guard. Really, he needs to have been gone already.

He gives up his search for the origin point of the spell and now instead of looking for the strongest point, he looks for the weakest. Which isn’t saying much. The patch he locates is a few millimeters of off-white, as opposed to the blinding glow of the rest of the thing. He takes the Blade and jabs it forwards. The net of threads bends under the pressure he’s applying to it, but the Blade doesn’t manage to pierce it. Of course not, that’d be easy.

He pushes in as hard as he can and then begins to twist, like he’s trying to drive a screw into a hole that’s slightly too small. Bit by bit he feels the Blade creep forward, his progress measured in millimeters, if it’s measured at all.

“Good work. At this rate you’ll have the door open by the time we’re both dead.”

“The more you talk the less likely you are to survive this encounter, douchebag.”

“Is that what this is about, vengeance?”

Metatron doesn’t get his answer, because at that precise moment Dean feels the net give ever so slightly. He yanks the Blade out and examines the hole, two microscopic loose threads dangling where the Blade has finally worn them through. It might look like nothing significant, but it’s all that Dean needs. He grasps hold of the top one and yanks. That’s all it takes to make the entire thing crumble, threads unspooling and falling to the ground as the spell disintegrates.

By the time Metatron has realized what’s happening Dean already has him pinned. He draws the First Blade across his throat, just deep enough that a little blood wells up without letting his grace come tumbling out.

“The only reason your grace isn’t dribbling out onto the ground now is because you have something I need.”

“You want knowledge from the demon tablet? I’ll give it you, whatever you want.”

“Wrong. The spell you used to cast the angels from heaven—”

Metatron starts to laugh but the motion pushes his neck closer up against the Blade and that sobers him pretty quickly.

“I should have known this was all about Castiel. You want to know if any of his grace was left, correct?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, today is your lucky day, Dean Winchester. How about we make a deal. I take you to your precious angel’s one remaining hope, and you let me go.”

“Seems fair.”

“How about we make this binding?”

Dean puts a little more pressure on the Blade at Metatron’s throat. He can see his grace sparking beneath the surface. It’d only take a tiny slip to release it out into the world. He wants to, so badly. Every cell in his body is screaming at him to do it, demanding that he take penance for what’s been done to him. If Metatron weren’t such a powerful enemy he’d do an Achilles, go one further even, pierce him through the ankle while he’s still alive and drag him by it, haul him across the world until he’s lacerated and bloody, until he’s suffered as much as it is possible for one being to do so. But the demon in Dean is canny, and while it wants vengeance it also wants, more than anything, to stay alive. It’s prepared to settle for killing Metatron. It is not prepared to settle for letting him go.

“No.”

“Then I won’t take you.”

Dean shrugs.

“Then I bottle up your grace and feed it to Cas to keep him going until he can find it for himself.”

“Why didn’t you just do that in the first place?”

“He objects to absorbing his brothers and sisters. I’m sure he’d make an exception for you, though, all the trouble you’ve caused. What’ll it be like? Do you just poof and die, or is it like being a reverse meat suit, trapped in another angel as they tap your batteries and you slowly fade into nothing?”

“You wouldn’t.” Metatron says, although privately he’s sure he’s about to die.

“I would. And I’m finding it very hard to reign myself in right now. Keep talking and die in your cell, or take me to Cas’s grace and we’ll see if the good news helps me feel any more merciful.”


	11. Don't Take What Isn't Yours

Metatron teleports them to a sprawling oak somewhere in the south of France.

“Here. This is it. I swear.”

It’s something, certainly. Dean can feel the crackle and hum of angelic energy even from yards back.

“Where are we?”

“About twenty miles outside Carcassonne, France. I needed to make sure it ended up somewhere you wouldn’t stumble across it accidentally.”

“Uh-huh.”

Dean moves the Blade from Metatron’s throat and in one fluid movement stabs it into the joint of his left shoulder, wrenching it out again with a needlessly painful twist. Metatron howls, trying to double over but being forced upright in Dean’s grip.

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

“Don’t play dumb with me.”

“How can you tell without extracting it?” He hisses.

Dean doesn’t bother to answer.

“Next time I take off a limb. And maybe you’ll be able to grow it back, but I’m sure there’s only a finite amount of times you can do that before things starts getting nasty.”

 

*

 

This time they end up somewhere near Colorado. Dean knows they’re in the right place almost before they’ve finished materializing. His shoulder burns like someone’s taken a blowtorch to it, right where that handprint used to be. He spares a glance down at it and can see a faint blue glow through the material of his shirt. The stunted tree in the center of the clearing starts to glow in sympathy and Metatron tries to back away, which is hard when there’s someone behind you holding an oversized knife against your throat.

“Why is it doing that? It should only do that in Castiel’s presence.”

“Funny story.” Dean says, and doesn’t bother to explain further.

He avoids the logistical nightmare of trying to walk Metatron over to the tree and extract the grace while still keeping him captive by hobbling him, slicing through his Achilles tendons. He’s noticed that the shoulder wound doesn’t seem to be healing at all, so he figures it’ll be safe enough to leave him there while he gets the grace.

He could just kill him there and let his blood water Cas’s tree, but the demon in him has been clamoring to shred Metatron in the most hideous of ways since they laid hands on him. Dean thinks it’s only fair that he gets Cas’s grace first and then rewards the demon properly for its patience.

He takes Metatron’s angel blade and uses it to cut a deep wound into the tree. The amount of grace that drips out is pretty pathetic, barely enough to half fill a vial, but hopefully it’ll be enough to clean Cas of the fetid mess rotting him from the inside out, even if it does mean he’s forced to live out the rest of his short life as a human. And if it isn’t enough, well. Dean tried. Let that much be said.

Behind Dean, Metatron heals himself and stands. He doesn’t teleport away immediately; instead he waves, slowly and triumphantly. And like all good villains, it’s this little cocky goodbye that damns him. A hellhound materializes, all matted yellow-white fur, bunched muscles and bloody, slavering fangs. It throws itself at Metatron, fastens its bear-trap jaws on his arm and wrenches. He flicks it off but another takes its place, a snarling dervish of coal smoke and razorblade claws. More and more appear in the clearing, dog shaped clouds of poison gas, ashen masses that slaver molten lava, hulking figures formed of shards of broken glass, and even one particularly disgusting specimen composed of slime and fetid meat.

Individually, they’d be no match for Metatron, but by sheer force of numbers they overwhelm him. One rips off his left arm and takes it away to sit under a tree, gnawing at it like any normal dog with a bone. Another buries its face in his stomach, tears away the skin and fat and pulls out hot, glistening strings of entrails, while a third crunches his head between its teeth, chunks of white skull and goopy, grey matter visible through the streams of blood. The others wrestle over whatever they can reach, tearing off great strips of gristle and skin.

Of course, vicious and painful as this is, a pack of hellhounds is no more capable of killing an angel than a single beast. They’re certainly doing their job though, keeping him pinned down while Crowley saunters through the melee. He picks up a hellhound made of dripping seaweed by its kelpy scruff and flings it aside. Where it was feasting is a pulpy mass of red flesh and something that looks like splintered ribcage and heartstrings. Crowley draws an angel blade from his coat pocket and balances it on the space where the heart used to be. He toys with it for a second, twirling it around gently on the spot and then he slowly pushes it in with a single finger.

There’s a deafening roll of thunder, a smell of charcoal and cooked meat, and there are Metatron’s wings, the last remaining set of untarnished angel wings, burned onto the grass.

Dean whips around, looking every bit as canine as the writhing pile of hellhounds. His eyes sweep over the scene and then he roars, a scream of such furious hatred that several of the dogs turn tail and flee. Those that don’t come to wish that they had. The bottle of grace is left, abandoned by the tree as he charges over. He doesn’t bother to draw the First Blade. Instead he grabs one hellhound by the head and haunches, pulling in opposite directions until its spine breaks with a wrenching snap. He breaks the back of another with clenched fists and rips off the head of a third, screaming as he throws it into the sky.

That gets the attention of the remainder of the pack, yelping and whining as they scatter. Not even fear of Crowley’s whip hand is enough to override their hell forged survival instincts, and so they creep back into the shadows, circling the clearing from a distance with their tails tucked.

Dean draws the First Blade and lashes out with it, tearing great gouges out of the already defiled body on the ground.

“Dean.” Crowley says his name, thinking it’ll be enough to snap him out of his murderous rage. Instead it only redirects it. He launches himself at Crowley with another feral howl.

“HOW DARE YOU.”

Crowley scrabbles backwards on his ass, hands and angel blade thrust in front of him to try and hold Dean back.

“Dean, stop. It’s me.”

 _“That was my kill.”_ Crowley flinches at the weight of venom in his voice.

“He was escaping; I was doing you a favor.”

“You had no _RIGHT_.”

“Okay, you’re pissed, but we had a deal, a binding deal.”

“I didn’t sign a deal.” Dean stills, though, suspicious.

“I proposed an exchange of services, you said yes. That’s a deal.”

Dean is shaking with the effort required not to rip out Crowley’s guts on the spot.

“That’s not how it works.”

“It is between the King of Hell and one of his Knights.”

That only enrages Dean further.

“I’m not _your_ Knight.” He snarls, drawing back the Blade ready to slice something off.

“Dean! Stop! You made a deal, you go back on that and bad things will happen.” Crowley garbles out as quickly as he can

Dean narrows his eyes, suspicious.

“What bad things?” He sneers.

“You’ll get dragged back to hell, for starters. And trust me, you of all people do not want to be anywhere near hell right now.”

Dean roars again, spittle flying and landing on Crowley’s face.

“Easy, easy. I took your kill, it was a mistake. An honest mistake. I was trying to help you and I messed up so how about I set you up with something else in return? There must be others you want to kill— hunters who’ve wronged you, monsters who escaped—angels who made your life a misery. You name them and I’ll have them captured, set loose in a location of your choosing, let you chase them down.”

The demon in Dean perks up at that. It’s been denied its kill; it might be appeased somewhat with another. Not fully, mind, but it’ll accept it. Dean overrules it though, better to remove any obligation they have to Crowley first.

“I’ll wave off the personal hunt on two conditions.” He bites out, the words coming clipped and stilted as the demon rebels and tries to stop them. “Release me from the deal—”

“No can do.” He flinches as Dean’s expression settles back to murderous. “It’s binding. No matter how much I might want to, there’s nothing I can do to break it now. A deal between demons as powerful as we are isn’t like the usual crossroads contract. No one holds them. They’re carved into the brimstone of hell; if either of us try to weasel out hell itself will be the one to punish us.”

“Hell is just a place, cut the crap.”

“Don’t presume to talk about things you know nothing of.”

“Don’t take that tone with me if you want to keep your _HEAD_.” Dean’s voice rises with each word until he’s screaming.

“What’s the second condition?” Crowley asks quickly.

“I want that bit of my soul back.”

Crowley laughs.

“That? You fell for _that?_ ”

Dean punches Crowley in the face.

“Do you want to get dragged to hell?” He spits, rubbing his cheek.

“You said I can’t kill you, said nothing about maiming.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just. Even death can’t split a soul but you think _I_ could.”

It’s not that Dean had forgotten what Death told him about souls, that period of his life might have been one that the fully human version of himself hadn’t liked to dwell on— Sam without a soul, Cas’s betrayal— but he still remembered it with photorealistic clarity. It’s that all that had been about human souls. Demons are an altogether different breed; it hadn’t seemed weird at the time that the King of Hell would have that kind of power over his demonic kin. Maybe it should have, but whatever. He’s not going to beat himself up about it; it actually turned out well for him. If he hadn’t thought being cured could kill him he’d have had no qualms about strapping himself to the chair and just letting them get on with it.

“You’re telling me you don’t have a piece of my soul?”

“No. I just said that so they wouldn’t cure you. You’re no good to me as a moping, self-doubting human. I wanted Dean Winchester 2.0. New and improved.”

“You got him.”

Dean punches Crowley a couple of times and then lets him go, backing up and pocketing Cas’s grace from where it rests beside the tree.

“You can’t give me any of the things I want. That puts you in my debt, contract or none. Remember that next time you coming knocking, my _King_.” He sneers the word, washing the title with scorn and derision.

Crowley doesn’t take his cue to leave so Dean is forced to clarify for him.

“That was a dismissal, _sire_.”

Crowley up and vanishes with his hellhounds, before Dean figures out that he’s been talking bollocks and there’s no contract ensuring his continued survival.

Dean waits a moment, making sure he’s really gone, and turns towards a lopsided Colorado spruce in the west corner of the clearing.

“You can come out now.” He addresses the tree.

Hannah steps out from behind it.

“How did you know I was there?”

“I was keeping an eye on the dogs, noticed they wouldn’t go within a 100 foot radius of that tree. Figured something Heavenly had to be scaring them off.”

“Hmm.”

“So, I take it you’re here for Metadouche.”

That gets a reaction out of her.

“You had no _right.”_

“Look, I know there was a long list out for his blood, but he’s dead now. That’s what matters.”

“Trust a demon.” Hannah sneers. “We had him imprisoned. We were serving justice on him!”

“Screw your angelic justice! He deserved the way he died, torn apart by fucking dogs. I just wish I’d been the one to slide that fucking blade into his heart.”

“That wasn’t your choice to make!”

“Lady, he killed me. It was every bit my choice.”

“ _You_ didn’t stay dead, unlike all the angels who died in the fall, in the war afterwards.”

Dean shrugs.

“Not my concern. Look. We can fight back and forth about this all day. Not important. I actually have something for you.”

Hannah’s look of pure suspicion makes him laugh out loud.

“Calm it.” He draws the bottle of grace out of his pocket. “I don’t know how long you’ve been there, how much you saw.”

“That’s an angel’s grace, Dean. What have you done?” She looks horrified.

“Relax. It’s not anyone you know. Wait. Scratch that, it is. It’s Cas’s.”

The horrified look gets worse if anything.

“Whoa, whoa. I didn’t kill him! It’s leftover from the heaven spell.”

“Metatron lead you to it?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know it belongs to Castiel?”

Dean pulls his shirt out of the way so that Hannah can clearly see the glowing handprint.

“It does this whenever he’s around.”

It’s actually getting brighter. Must be something to do with being so close to the concentrated power of Cas’s grace.

“Interesting.” She looks like she wants to come close and examine it. She also looks like she wants to be anywhere but near Dean right now. Revulsion wins out and she stays put.

“You’re just going to give me his grace?”

“Yup.”

“No bargaining, no deals?”

Dean shrugs.

“I want him better, I just don’t want to be there for it. If I see him again he’ll try and ‘cure’ me and I’m happy as I am.”

His shoulder is burning now, like Cas is standing right beside him and no. Hell no. There’s a pair of headlights speeding rapidly towards them. Familiar headlights. They’re in the middle of nowhere, there’s no way that shitty fucking Continental belongs to anyone but Cas. FUCK.

The car swings to an aggressive halt, nearly smashing the passenger side into a tree. Sam and Cas propel themselves out, armed to the teeth. Well, Sam propels himself out, Cas kind of falls out of it in an ungainly fashion. It’s a good thing Dean hurried up on the grace front because damn he looks like he’s got hours to live.

Dean rounds on Hannah.

“Is this you?”

She shakes her head.

“Dean!”

Sam sounds beyond pissed.

“What the fuck are you two doing here?”

“We were on your trail, about twenty miles from here when I felt my grace being extracted.” Cas says. His voice isn’t as cold as Sam’s. Although it’s so quavering and weak that it’s hard to tell what he’s feeling.

“Fucks's sake.” Dean swears. Trust his dumb fucking luck to lay a false trail through the very place he ends up.

“Well, touching as this is, I’m gonna take my cue—”

“You’re not leaving, Dean.” Sam grits out.

“Uh. Yeah. I am.”

“Look. I get it; you were pissed at us for keeping you contained. We should have talked it out, but we can make this work, go after Crowley—”

“Oh, uh, didn’t you hear the news, he never had my soul.” Dean waves his hands sardonically.

Sam and Cas gape at him.

“Yeah, turns out you can’t actually split souls in bits, not even demon ones. Something we really should have worked out. Oops.” His tone is deliberately flippant now.

“That’s great news, Dean! We can cure you. I’m sure there’s a church around here.” Sam’s anger is washed away in the onslaught of overexcited puppy mode.

Dean snorts.

“You haven’t got a fucking clue, have you?”

Hannah cuts in. “You won’t be able to reason with him. It’s been too long, he’s nearly all demon.”

“She gets it.” Dean gestures lazily at her with the Blade.

“But, Dean—”

He doesn’t let Sam finish.

“There’s nothing you can say to make me give this up. For once in my life, I’m top of the food chain. Yeah, so I might have to make the odd kill, feed the beast, but how’s that much different to the day job anyway—except now I’ve got the power to do what I want with impunity. No more getting thrown at walls, being outrun, outfought, outmatched at almost every turn. Now I’m the apex fucking predator.”

“You want to throw away your humanity, your family, just so you can be a better hunter?” Sam is incredulous.

“Who said I was gonna be hunting monsters, Sammy?”

“So that’s it. You’re just gonna up and leave us behind?”

Dean laughs.

“You want to know what the best bit about this is? Not having to give a shit about family. I feel good, really fucking good. For the first time in years. No more being dragged down by family and duty and all that fucking emotional damage I used to cart around.

“All the crap that happened to me before I was reborn, it doesn’t mean jack anymore. I can think about you and him,” he points the Blade at Cas “betraying me. I can think about Bobby, Mom, Dad, Jo, Ellen, Benny, Rufus…you name ‘em we’ve lost them. I can think about my childhood, all the shitty things that Dad forced me to do, and it just rolls off.”

He says it all in such a breezy, confident tone that Sam doesn’t doubt that this is what Dean is feeling for a second. And that fucks him up.

“We—” he stammers, “we can’t just let this go, Dean. If you really were Dean you’d know that.”

“I gave you fair warning. Alright. Remember that. Now you fucking catch me if you can.”

He hurls the bottle with Cas’s grace in, high as he can and then dives into the Continental. He’s counting on Sam being in too much of a hurry to take the keys out, and he’s rewarded. He swings the car around, hands pulling at the wheel, and shoots off to the west. 


	12. The Grass Won't Be Greener When I Set it on Fire

Dean expected to get some satisfaction out of Metatron’s death. Okay, he didn’t think the heavens would open, confetti would fall and all would be well with the world, but he at least thought he’d be able to stop thinking about killing the sonofabitch. Maybe that’s the problem. He didn’t kill him. Crowley and his fucking pet hellhounds did. He pulls his current car over, some modern hatchback piece of crap that has a speedometer that goes up to 105 and an engine that can barely make 70, and thinks about calling the King of Hell.

It’s not that he wants to fulfill his end of their deal, you understand. It’s that he has an obligation hanging over his head, and the sooner that’s gone the sooner he can wipe Crowley off the face of the planet. That might mean he has to take his place as King of Hell though, and like fuck does he want that. Demons probably have some dumb succession by combat rule. Whoever kills the King of the heap gets to take his place. Big whoop. Sounds like an awful lot of responsibility and probably eternity spent having to watch your back. No. Thank. You.

Fuck it, he’s just going to drive until he gets bored. It’s not like Crowley has any real power over him anyway. There wasn’t a time frame on this deal, so long as he stays clear of the limey prick and doesn’t get given a direct order he should be fine.

He drives for three days, taking a long, looping route through small towns and along dusty abandoned roads. He backpedals frequently, because he feels like it, and eventually ends up stopping at a crowded little dive someplace outside Taos where the booze flows freely, and after a while so do the fists.

Dean doesn’t start it, some twelve year old jerkoff spilling beer on his crotch and making a joke about incontinent old men starts it.

He decks the kid with a solid punch and then of course all his fucking prepubescent friends join the party. One sneaks up behind Dean and tries to lock his arms together. All he gets for his trouble is a swift stamp to the instep before Dean moves on to the others. He might have been exaggerating when he called them thirteen, but there’s no denying they’re all kids. Not a single one touching the drinking age. That doesn’t stop Dean tearing through them with the fury he’d usually reserve for a monster hunt.

He goes for the biggest first, figures you get him and the rest will back off. Somewhere along the way forgetting that maybe the locals might be inclined to side with their kids as opposed to the stranger whaling on them. He gets the kid to the floor and is battering away at his ribs when two burly trucker looking types hook him up by the arms, holding him steady while a third weighs his fist.

“Impala.” Dean grins up at them.

“The shit you mean by that?”

“S’my safeword. Let’s get this party started, handsome.” He winks lasciviously.

As expected, they lose their shit.

The guys holding him jerk away, like they think they’re going to catch _screaming bender_ off him and the guy in front stops bouncing his fist and starts throwing it. Dean ducks down and charges forward, grabbing him by the waist and hurling him onto the ground. He spins around and, finding the arm of one guy snaking around his head and trying to squeeze, he does what comes naturally and bites down, mouth coming away bloody as the guy wrenches back.

“You’re a fucking psycho.”

Dean just grins, crazy eyes and bloody teeth. Before he was just fighting for shits and giggles, but now the blood in his mouth is singing out to the demon inside him. It still hasn’t had its quota of flesh and it’s getting impatient. Dean tamps it down. He’s on the run from the terrible twosome, one of whom might now have some renewed angel powers; the last thing he wants is to paint a bright fucking target on his head. So he’s not going to kill anyone, but that doesn’t mean he can’t have some fun.

He lobs a few glasses at people who aren’t looking, grins when the guys targeted whip around and launch themselves at the first thing they see. Within a few minutes he’s got a full on bar brawl rocking and he ducks and dives throughout the crowded mass, throwing punches and kicks and receiving quite a few in return. This is it. His fucking element.

By the time he gets thrown out, with a warning to never step foot in Podunkville, The Ass-End Of Nowhere, NM again, lest he be rent limb from limb, he’s bleeding freely from numerous places. He probably has two black eyes, his face feels like so much ground beef and his knuckles are scraped practically to the bone. He gets himself a few miles away before he heals up. It’s all very well feeling the adrenaline scream through his guts but he can do without the niggling aches bringing down his high.

He finds himself driving out east. He tells himself it’s because he feels like it, but he’s lying. He feels a pull. He’s still driving in a haphazard, back and forth loop, but for some reason every time he comes to an intersection or a fork in the road there’s a little voice niggling at the back of his skull: East, East, East. He listens to it more often than not, sometimes deliberately striking out to the southwest and churning up hundreds of miles in the other way. These fits of rebellion never last for longer than a handful of hours though, that nagging feeling always coming back to him, driving him steadily towards Missouri.

With his meandering route it takes Dean nearly a week to cross the state boundary. In this time the itch under his skin deepens, develops into a clawing, burning ache. The last hundred miles take him nearly a whole day. He keeps having to pull the car over and wait out the shaking in his hands, his twitching, spasming legs. The only thing that soothes him is the Blade. His hand strays towards it more frequently, casual little touches at first, migrating to full on coveting as time passes.

By the time he reaches Cain’s bee farm he can barely sit still. He screeches to a halt and barrels out of his shitty car. He hammers on the door, running on the spot, punching out at the air and then the wooden paneling when no-one responds. He jogs around, swearing when he realizes that the only car here is his own. In a fit of temper he throws a vicious punch through the wall and then sprints, back and forth from the car to the house, throwing all his speed and strength into it in an attempt to burn out some of his overflowing energy.

He runs like this for hours, until the sun is setting and he’s starting to think that maybe Cain has moved. He decides to give it until full dark and then he’s gonna have to rip a fucking cow in half. Just do something, anything to soothe that fucking howling need in him to kill something, someone, anything.

He sees headlights in the distance and he abandons his back and forth to run towards them. It’s Cain. He doesn’t seem at all surprised to see Dean haring down the track towards him, but he doesn’t roll down his window or come to a halt. He drives down the muddy path at an infuriatingly slow pace, forcing Dean to jog alongside him at less than walking speed.

He doesn’t say a word as he parks up, shushing Dean as he tries to speak, and pointing at the bags on the back of his truck.

It’s only when everything has been unloaded and he’s sitting in his living room with a beer, having handed Dean one which he doesn’t drink, just jiggles rapidly against his leg, that Cain speaks.

“Didn’t think you were coming back.”

“Didn’t think I was either. I just ended up here.”

“Hmm. You’re looking jumpy.”

“I can’t stop.”

“The Mark likes to be fed.”

“The Mark can bite me.”

He thinks he feels a twinge in his arm at that, but it’s hard to tell when the whole rest of his body is vibrating.

Cain slugs down the rest of his beer and then stands and stretches.

“To business?”

“Sure.”

“You made me a promise last time.”

“I did.”

“So?”

“How’d you wanna do this? Gonna bend over or do you want to go out fighting?”

“What makes you think you’d win if we went toe to toe?”

Dean smirks.

“Kid, you can’t even stand straight.”

“I’ll be fine once I warm up.”

“Your funeral.”

Cain throws his bottle at Dean. He whips out the First Blade and smashes it, sending shards of glass flying everywhere.

“You’re going to kill me with my own weapon? Poetic.” Cain sneers.

Dean ignores the remark. He’s not shaking now, every muscle is tuned and ready as he sizes Cain up, eyes on the center of his chest as he looks for any of the telltale twitches that’ll telegraph his movements. If they were fighting fair he’d let Cain get to the kitchen, grab one of the knives so he at least has a weapon to match against Dean’s Blade. As is, Dean backs him away from it, keeping his body between his opponent and any chance of arming himself.

Cain is the first to break. He lunges forward, ducking under Dean’s wide swing of the Blade and snicking a line along his ribs with a dirk drawn from his boot. It doesn’t do any real damage, but it’s enough to remind Dean to take this fight seriously. He’s matched against the Father of Murder. Just because the guy is retired and farming bees doesn’t mean he’s no longer deadly as fuck.

Dean goes on the attack after that, launching himself forward and cleaving the Blade down where Cain’s head should be. He misses by a hair’s breadth as Cain jerks out of the way. The movement off-balances both of them, Cain stumbling backwards and Dean pulled down by the strength of his own blow. Dean recovers first, kicking out at Cain’s knee. Cain falls onto his back, hands scrabbling for purchase on the ground and being cut by the broken glass from earlier.

He grabs a fistful and throws it at Dean’s face. Dean’s hand gets up in time to block most of it, but a sliver gets in his eye and he howls, momentarily blinded. Cain seizes his chance while Dean’s healing himself, propels himself to his feet and tackles Dean to the ground. Their weapons are abandoned in favor of close quarters grappling. Cain grabs Dean’s head and slams it against the ground again and again, until Dean’s flailing hands find Cain’s eyes and he gouges his thumbs in.

Cain lets go with a scream and Dean kicks him off. The adrenaline and bloodlust and fighting fury are coursing through him. This is better than any bar fight, better than any monster hunt. Here he is well matched, but still utterly confident in his own skills, knows he is going to come out top. He can feel it as they wrestle, the raw power coiled up in his own muscles just waiting to be unleashed.

His foot connects with Cain’s diaphragm and he can feel the sharp punched out exhale as he knocks the wind out of him. Dean lunges for his Blade, grasping hold of it and slashing at Cain. It connects, slicing into the meat of his thigh as he backs away again.

The sight of blood seems to heighten Dean’s senses. Suddenly he feels like Cain is moving in slow motion. Every time Cain lunges towards him Dean flows out of the way, more dancing than fighting. He starts to toy with him, can see the pain and frustration in Cain’s eyes. He wants to shout at Dean, tell him to stop this, fucking finish him off, but he doesn’t. His pride keeps him lunging and twisting out of the way, barely missing being skewered each time.

And just like that Dean’s jitters and shakes come back. He nearly flings the Blade from his hand, has to tighten his grip on it at an unnatural angle just to keep hold of it. Cain grins at him, all teeth and menace, and Dean curses himself for getting cocky again. He’s new to this demon shit; his powers seem to come in uncontrollable ebbs and flows. He should have taken his chance and gutted Cain when he was on the up, now he can barely hold his weapon.

Cain lunges at Dean and knocks the Blade out of his hand. Dean tries to focus, center himself, but all he can concentrate on is the scent of blood, thick and heavy in the air. He remembers this, back from when he was a vampire. It’s a little different this time, though. When he was a vampire, it was the urge to drink blood that he was consumed with.  Now he just wants to shed it, rip Cain in half and watch as his juices flow and dribble out onto his fancy fucking carpet.

He ducks a blow, fumbles for his Blade again. His fingers connect with something. Cain’s dirk. He’ll take it. He lunges up with it, drawing a thin line across Cain’s outstretched arm. He hisses in pain and withdraws, giving Dean enough time to arm himself with both Cain’s blade and his own.

He rolls his shoulders, eyes on the center of Cain’s chest, and then he throws himself into a headlong attack, all caution abandoned. He lashes out with the dirk from one side and the First Blade with the other. The dirk misses, but the Blade finds its mark. It bites into Cain’s side, slicing a path through his ribs like they’re made of butter and coming to rest in the center of his chest.

Cain looks at Dean, something unreadable in his eyes, and then he dies. He doesn’t explode, or spark out. Instead bright reddish-pink light dribbles out of his pores like smoke, gathering, fog-like in the room. It lingers there for a moment, coalescing and growing brighter with each moment until it locks onto a target. Dean.

The Mark glows a sympathetic red as the fog starts to whip around, gathering speed until it’s spinning in a funnel tornado. With a last crackle of blazing energy it pours itself into Dean’s arm.

It lights him up from the inside, branching network of bones and arteries and nerves sparking under his skin. He throws back his head and screams at the sky. The clear night is broken by a pulse of lightning that illuminates Dean, casting a grotesque shadow on the wall. It towers above him, thickly muscled body framed by spread draconic wings, battle-axe spined tail whipping back and forth, its stag’s skull head warped by jagged sabre fangs.

Dean roars, and his roar is the thunder that didn’t come with the unnatural lightning. It carries for miles, and everywhere it’s heard a sickening, pervasive sense of dread settles.

And then Dean vanishes.


	13. Not So Great At Laying Low

He materializes in a bar in Chicago. It’s a Wednesday night and it’s packed to the rafters with college students. For a few seconds they think Dean’s appearance is a trick, staged for their benefit. It doesn’t take long for them to realize otherwise. Dean still has the Blade in one hand and the dirk in the other and he sweeps them out in a wide circle. The dirk doesn’t do much, but the Blade slices through sequins, cotton, fat, gristle and bone as though they were nothing more than wind resistance.

It takes a moment for the panic to filter through the crowd but once it does there is chaos. People fight their way out of the doors, as many being injured in the crush as by Dean’s attack. He’s a dervish of brutal chaos, blades lashing like extensions of his arms, teeth bared in a feral snarl and his shadow still cast, demonic, upon the walls.

The pink light hasn’t faded from his veins. It glows out through his skin, casting him in a harsh neon glow that only serves to exaggerate his unearthly fury. The crowd near him has thinned, his wild slashes cutting through air more often than flesh now. He drops the dirk and throws himself forward, knocking down a burly looking guy in a University of Chicago hoodie. They roll together on the floor for a brief moment, Dean savoring the rancid stench of his terror followed by the distinct reek of piss. Dean laughs, stowing his weapons and digging his thumbs into the flesh of the guy’s cheeks on either side. His nails pierce through and the student screams pitifully. Dean grabs hold of a fistful of artfully messy brown hair and rips it out, savoring the move to silent rasps of abject terror and fear.

Dean pulls in a deep breath, drinking in the stench of terror and violence. He licks one of his thumbs clean and the taste of blood sparks something deep down where he used to have a soul. He leans down slowly, thumb gently tracing a patch of unmarred skin on the boy’s left cheek, and then carefully latches his mouth onto his victim’s neck. He worries it gently between his teeth, and then he clamps down and wrenches. The skin comes away from the throat with a sound like someone shredding wet cardboard. Dean spits out the mess of epidermal tissue and then buries his face back in the wound, gnawing through to the gullet.

By the time Dean has done playing the bar is empty. His head whips back and forth, scanning the area, looking for something else he can attack. The reek of fear has faded a little and now he can smell stale sweat, vomit and booze. He hops over the bar and snags a bottle of whiskey, taking long gulps as he meanders towards the exit. The door is locked and when he rattles it he can hear chains on the other side. No sirens yet. Shame. Defenseless teenagers are all very well, fucking hilarious in fact, but he wants to fight something that’s a challenge. The pissbaby student satisfied his urgent need to kill, but now he wants something else.  He wants a chase or a fight.

He yanks at the door a few times to no avail and then backs up. He charges forward, body-slamming his way out, smashing the chains and earning a glut of terrified screams. He laughs as he barrels through splintered wood and creaking metal. He could have teleported out, but there’s no fun in that. Some of the fucking morons from the bar have stuck around. They saw him rampaging around and thought, _nah, he’s only got a sword, he won’t get through the door_ and they stuck around to watch the police rip him into pieces.

They want a show, they’re getting one. He dances his way through the crowd, never staying long enough to torment, just dealing out stabs and gouges to whoever takes his fancy. By the time the police arrive he’s carving his way through a panicking crowd that have trapped themselves with their own morbid fascination.

They can’t open fire on him until everyone else is out of the way, so he has plenty of time to grab himself a hostage. Some slightly too curious passer-by. Not a college student this time, just a random innocent bystander. Maybe she had her whole life head of her, maybe she was destined to work forever in McDonalds— like that somehow makes her less worthy than some multibillionaire working for a bank.

Not that Dean cares about any of this. All he sees is a beating human heart, blood that can be spilled on the ground. He hugs her tight to his chest, Blade snicking lightly at her throat.

“Let go of the hostage,” A megaphone voice demands of him, and he acquiesces, springing and rolling to the side. They aren’t expecting that. It takes a few beats before bullets strafe across the now almost deserted street. He gets pierced by a few—arms, legs, head. They’re regular bullets though, just an itch until the flesh under them heals and he pops them out onto the ground with a metallic clink.

He doesn’t teleport away. That would be like giving up and he’s so full of pure demonic bloodlust that the very thought burns him. Demons have self-preservation instincts up to the hilt; if they’re going to lose a fight they’ll play dirty or leave. If they’re going to win though, it goes against every grain of their hell fashioned fury to leave a battle unfinished.

So Dean rips apart the cops, swallows their bullets and spits them out through chipped teeth. He charges into a hail of gunfire and by the time he reaches the pigs he’s a fleshy zombie riddled with bullet holes. He could heal himself, but he enjoys the fear. The terrified realization that this man is more air holes than flesh, and yet he’s still pushing forward with only his teeth and nails and a prehistoric looking weapon. He likes to look them in the eye and see the slow ticking realization _, this is how I am going to die._

 

*

 

Dean carves a swathe the streets of Chicago on foot, forsaking the easy escape of teleporting for the thrill of the chase. He hurls himself down blind alleys and into subways, pushing his body beyond the limits of any human endurance as he outruns cop cars. You wouldn’t think there’s much fun in fleeing cops, especially not for a demon who could kill them with barely a thought, but that’s the point. Dean knows the power he has, knows he’s the apex predator, stretching his legs until he gets bored, decides to flip around and snap up his pursuers in his gaping maw. He’s playing with them, plain and simple.

Once he gets tired of running he plants himself in the middle of the street and braces himself, expecting them to try and run him over rather than risk open combat. Either these guys are stupid or they don’t know what happened to their buddies because they swing their cars to a halt and surround him, guns drawn and yelling at him to drop his weapon and lay down on the ground. Dean does neither. He bull-rushes the nearest, shrugging off the bullets and hefting the guy up, throwing him at one of his compatriots.

He takes out the cops in the immediate area and throws himself into an abandoned car. For all that he’s done, he expected there to be more chaos, helicopters and TV news and screaming panic in the streets. Aside from the crowd outside the bar where he materialized, there hasn’t really been anything. He’s almost disappointed as he careers down the road at the top speed his newest vehicle can manage.

It takes a few miles for the sirens to pick up and the chase to start again. He leads them down Route 41 for a bit before he gets fed up of dodging between shitty traffic. It’s hard to have a serious car chase when the chased car can barely get above 50 without having to duck and weave between idiots who don’t know how to drive.

He punches out onto more abandoned roads and leads his pursuers on a merry chase half way to Indianapolis before he gets bored. He keeps driving until he comes to some national park looking place with a steep grassy bank leading to dark, haunted forest-esque woodland. He spins the car off the edge, going for an even more dramatic burnout than the Impala. He gets it. The car lands, skidding to a halt in a scream of twisting metal and shattered glass. It erupts in a towering fireball.

Dean sits in the flaming wreck for a few minutes, intrigued by the feel of his skin trying to melt. He wonders if this is what hell is like for demons, all of them going about their business having to constantly keep a tiny corner of their minds dedicated to stopping themselves turning into slop.

He lets a patch of the skin on his face blister and burn off, instinctively glances towards the mirror to see what he looks like and then remembers it’s in pieces all around him. He lets go completely, allowing the flames to do as they will to him. He touches the weeping sores where his face used to be, feels the meat cooking and dropping off to let him run his fingers over the bone underneath. He wonders how long he’d have to sit here to pass the point of no return. Would he, even? Maybe his body, his meat suit he supposes, would die and he’d float his merry way back to hell. He probably shouldn’t test that. Crowley was right when he said hell was the last place Dean Winchester ought to be. There have to be a lot of demons in line there, vying for their chance to stick a knife in his back.

He barrels out of the car, stopping dropping and rolling to put out the flames in what little is left of him. Which has the added bonus of getting a metric fuckton of mud and road grit in his fresh wounds. It’s a good job he can heal on cue because otherwise, hello gangrene city, and that is not how he wants to die, limping and disheveled in some nature reserve outside Indianapolis, of all places.

The police are milling around on the bank up top, none of them quite willing to get near Dean Winchester’s fireball of doom. One of them spots him crawling his way into the tree line, alerts the others and a volley of shots ring out. A couple of bullets pierce the soft mud around him before they finally find their mark and clip him between the shoulders. He’s thrown forward, but he carries on crawling. He makes it into the trees, heals himself once he’s out of sight, feeling flesh thickening and spreading to fill the places it’d been burned off, skin slathering back across like thick cream. On the upper left side of his chest black spirals out from a single point, the ink blurring and washing in a mockery of the symbol that was there before— flames melting into a smudged, bloody drip, the star into a toothy, gaping maw.

He tries to will himself some clothes but they don’t come, so he’s left mostly naked as he teleports to a spot behind the cluster of officers. He hears one of them talking into his radio.

“Suspect fireballed off the road. Saw him crawling into the forest but he’s barely more than a charcoaled skeleton. Injuries like that he’ll already be dead by the time we can get a team down there…yep….okay, sure.”

The plan was to wait for a bit, see how long it takes them to twig that he’s here, but honestly, he gets bored. His attention span just isn’t what it used to be. He doesn’t know how demons get anything done in the long term. Ruby must have been a saint in life to retain the self-control she needed to manipulate Sam. Or maybe it settles down after a bit, he just has to get it out of his system, as it were. If that’s the case he’s certainly made a dent today.

He decides to cover his tracks somewhat. Things are gonna get real boring real fast if this all gets onto the news and some hunter comes down to investigate. Really he’s been titanically stupid already. Other hunters will be a pain, but he can deal with them easy enough; it’s Sam and Cas that he wants to avoid. Slicing his way through a chunk of the Chicago PD was maybe not the best way of laying low. He needs to cut the trail off here and then teleport somewhere far, far away. Maybe he’ll go visit Europe. He doesn’t have to fly now, perfect excuse to travel.

He comes up right behind one of the cops, slips the Blade up to his neck.

“Now, guys, stay calm and this’ll all be okay.”

They’re too stunned to do much more than gawk at him. How long does it take to train a police offer?  6 months, a year? What do they spend that time doing, fucking working out the circumference of the perfect donut? ‘Cause it sure as shit isn’t any combat training judging by these pricks.

Dean fits his palm over the cop’s trigger hand, lifting the weapon up and firing in rapid succession. His aim is solid. He drops all the other cops cleanly and then relinquishes the gun. It falls to the ground, covered in his captive’s prints and none of his own. He’s already been radioed in dead, now hopefully they’ll take these deaths as some rogue cop bullshit while he gets to have some fun with mister cop killer. What can he say, he’s weak.

He teleports them both back to the forest and lets the cop go, sans weapon and communication devices. He gives him a head start before running after. He’s not a monster, after all.

 

*

 

Dean is in the process of working out the best way to dispose of the pieces when he feels that nagging itching tingle in his shoulder. For fucks sake. He could warp away but he doesn’t. Fuck it, if they’re going to have it out, let’s have it out. This way he won’t have to spend his whole life watching his back at least. He’ll cull the pair of them here and now. 


	14. Here Come the Fun Police

They find Dean in Brown County State Park, surrounded by pieces of what might once have been a spine. They’re not naive enough to put their faith in it being of animal origin.

“Boys.” He stands up, dropping a handful of what look like guts.

“Dean…” Cas’s tone is a strange amalgamation of pity and horror. He might not be fully powered up, but he has enough grace inside him to see Dean’s true form. It towers over them, more suggestion and shadow than solid creature, crouching protectively over the human shell that anchors it to earth. A lot appears to have changed since they saw Dean last.

Dean notices Cas’s gaze tracking up above him and preens under it. The shadowy figure echoes his movements, flaring its wings and baring sharp teeth.

“What have you done to yourself, Dean?”

“I’ve made a few improvements.” He shrugs.

Sam’s eyes dart between the two of them, trying to follow a conversation he only half understands.

“What?” He asks

Dean turns to regard him.

“Sammy. Nice of you to join the party.”

Sam’s patience wears thin. Dean’s a flight risk and the longer they stand here chatting to him, the more likely he is to pull a stunt like last time and vanish.

“Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiri—”

Dean screams. This isn’t a scream of pain though, and he doesn’t crumple like the last few times they’ve tried to exorcise him. This scream is a physical thing, whipping through the forest like a harsh wind, stripping the trees in the immediate vicinity of their leaves. It burns, stops Sam’s chant before it can have any real effect.  He tries to cover both his ears with his one good arm but it doesn’t make any difference. He grits his teeth, draws his gun and fires at Dean.

Dean slips out of the way with ease, eyes black and howl tapering off to a low, rumbling growl. An itch in Sam’s brain, rather than an ache.  Cas, thinking he has the element of surprise, comes up behind Dean and grabs him in a bear hug. It might have worked if he was full powered, but he’s not. The grace left from Metatron’s spell was scant. Enough to flush the rot out of his system with a few sparks left over, most of which he used trying to locate his wayward demon friend.

Dean slips his grip and then tosses him away. Cas flies into a tree, breaking it with a harsh crack. He’s winded, but not seriously injured. Good news for him, not so good news for Sam, who has to fight a demon one handed and on his own.

He lunges forward with a bottle of holy water, aiming the spray towards Dean’s eyes. Dean flinches and pauses to scrape the burning liquid from his face. Sam seizes his chance, firing off another couple of devil’s trapped bullets, but even with his eyes burned and steaming Dean avoids them, sensing rather than seeing them. He heals himself and lunges at Sam, knocking the gun from his hand with a triumphant flourish.

He doesn’t have a chance to make much use of this advantage, as Cas recovers himself and crashes into Dean’s side, tumbling them to the ground. He doesn’t have the juice to knock Dean out with his grace _and_ then transport them back to the bunker, so he goes for the old fashioned way. He punches him, full weight of angelic fury weighing his arm, even if he doesn’t actively use his grace.

Dean laughs the blow off, spotting Sam standing behind, fumbling something that looks suspiciously like a set of handcuffs out of his pocket. He stops toying with Cas, gets his feet firmly under his torso and kicks him off. Dean springs up to his feet and extends his arms, taunting Sam by beckoning at him, Morpheus style.

Sam grunts in frustration.

“Just come with us, Dean.”

He laughs.

“Uh. No.”

“You need to fight it, Dean. I know you’re in there, we’ve fought through worse things.”

“You don’t get it, Sam. I’m not possessed, there isn’t some monster pulling my wires. This is me.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“That’s because you lack imagination.”

“Dean—”

“Don’t ‘ _Dean_ ’ me, like we’re kids and I’ve just stolen your candy. This. Is. It.”

“No. You’re still in there. You could have just disappeared off the face of the planet but you didn’t. You left a trail a mile wide. You wanted us to come here, to save you.”

Dean puts his hands up, like he’s surrendering, like Sam has found the magic phrase, the one that’ll let them cuff him up, take him home and cure him. His posture opens, he smiles, fond and sad. Sam takes a hesitant step forward, and Dean springs. He pins him against a tree, Blade slicing ever so gently into the soft flesh of his throat as he whispers into his ear.

“Didn’t occur to you, Sammy, that I lured you here to kill you?”

Sam remains steadfast.

“This is just the demon talking. You won’t do it, I know.”

He’s blustering, trying to cover the movement of his hand in his pocket so he can draw out the cuffs, snap them on and end this thing.

“It’s okay to want to come back. You can admit this, we’re family, Dean.”

Dean forsakes a verbal reply. With one hand he increases the pressure on the Blade, little rivulets of blood running down Sam’s neck and into the hem of his t-shirt, and with the other he grabs Sam’s healthy hand, pulling it out of his pocket and gouging his nails into the wrist, forcing him to drop the cuffs on the ground.

“Naughty, naughty.”

He pulls the Blade away, draws back to get some momentum and lunges forward with it. Cas grabs his wrist from behind, arresting the momentum of the thrust. Dean snarls in fury and whips around, twisting out of Cas’s grip and stabbing the Blade into the meat of his shoulder. It sticks there, gouged into the joint. Dean yanks it out roughly, knocking Cas back with his left fist as he readies the Blade for another blow, aiming this one to be fatal.

Cas reaches up, grabs at his left forearm, fingers trembling, nails scraping at the skin. Dean tries to flick him away, but his grip is strong, much stronger than it should be. He sees Cas’s eyes shine brilliant white as he prepares to use his grace.

Cas gathers up the last sparks of his grace, flushing his system for every tiny lingering trace of divine power, concentrates it into a bust of healing energy, and he pushes.

He falls, to the ground and from grace. Dean sees the white light, the way the blood is still flowing freely from Cas’s wound and he laughs. Stupid bastard used the last of his grace to try and heal an injury that wasn’t even going to kill him— and he failed. Fatal fucking mistake.

Now Cas is wheezing and gasping on the ground and there’s nothing to stop Dean from reaching down, jerking him up to his knees by his hair. He pulls his head back to bare his neck. He’s going to slit his throat and wet the ground with his blood.

He wonders if it’ll be like salting the earth, tainting it with the spilt blood of God’s divine instruments. He didn’t stick around long enough to see if the grass died beneath Metatron’s feet. Probably won’t stick around long enough here either.

He lines the Blade up against Cas’s throat.  He doesn’t make the cut.

 

*

 

Cas had never intended to heal his own wound.

When he gathered together those last flickers of his remaining grace, he didn’t direct their energy internally; instead he pushed them out of his body, through his outstretched hand and into Dean’s arm.

From there, they worked their way into Dean’s center, targeting the only salvageable fragment of his soul. It was tiny, fractured and besieged on all sides, not quite demon tainted, but far from pure. Cas’s last act as an angel was to make it human once more.

For the longest moment, he thought it hadn’t worked. That he didn’t have enough grace, or that there was too little redeemable soul left for it to make any difference.

 

Then Dean stills, his eyes flicking rapidly from black to green.

And then he vanishes. 


	15. There's No Place like Home

It’s like coming out of a dream. He’s disorientated, confused. Vague hints of the past few days swirl around his head, just out of reach and getting further away with every blink. He stops trying to trap them, takes in the situation around him. Sam collapsed and wheezing against a tree, Cas on his knees, throat bared, the First Blade snicking at vulnerable skin.

Dean panics. Doesn’t stay for an explanation, doesn’t stay to give himself a chance to finish what he’s clearly started here. He teleports, crashing into the dirt beside the crumpled wreck of the Impala. He leans against her, tries to ground himself and pull strength from her like he always does. It doesn’t work, this nagging little voice in his head is sneering at him, all malice and spite _. It’s just a car. Has never been anything but four wheels, a load of metal and a collection of outdated cassette tapes._

The Mark flares up on his arm in response to his negative emotions and that kills the scream right in his throat. Too far. This has gone too far. How could he have let it get to this? If whatever had woken him had happened a few seconds later Cas would be dead, Sam not long after him. _So?_ The voice scratching at the back of his skull pipes up. _They chose to get involved. If they’d just left us alone this would never have happened._

He gouges his nails into his arm, trying to block out the nagging temptation to pass the blame. Everything feels muted, like this isn’t his life. Like he’s in some sort of twisted virtual reality, his body going through the motions but his mind stubbornly refusing to immerse itself.

The image of Sam and Cas from the forest swims hazily to the forefront of his thoughts and already he can feel the fear and panic associated with it start to dim slightly. Downgrading itself from the end of his world to only a tragic accident. That’s wrong. He knows it’s wrong. He has to. He can’t… The Mark starts to burn on his arm again. It knows where his thoughts are heading, knows what he’s going to do if he isn’t stopped.

Dean pushes himself up off the Impala and teleports again. He lands, sprawled in the dust, outside the bunker. He blasts the door open, the need for haste warring with his reluctance to use his demonic powers lest he relapse and have another episode. The Mark itches under his skin and the voice in his head won’t stop whispering as he drags his suddenly lead-heavy body into the kitchen.

He grabs the huge, emergency tub of salt from the cupboard and makes his way down to the basement, being careful to avoid the myriad devil’s traps that litter his way. He still feels a slight residual anger at the sight of them, and the Mark tries to seize on it, stoke it into a raging fury and give itself an opportunity to take over. He doesn’t let it, tamps it down, counts to ten, thinks happy thoughts.

The devil’s trap in the basement has been mended, fresh concrete poured down and set. Good, that’s good. He was going to use a spray can, but this is better. He pours a line of salt across the door, sealing himself in the room, pours another between the bookcases. It can’t hurt to have as many as possible.  He creates a wide salt circle around the devil’s trap, bracing himself, and then he seals himself inside.

He feels the world around him constrict to the space of the trap, but this time it doesn’t make him angry. He feels lighter. It’s easier to think, his brain feels less swampish, and the voice in his head is reduced to a low murmur, difficult to even make out. Maybe it’s because this time it was his own conscious decision— he’s not being trapped so much as containing himself. Whatever, he thinks, as he snaps the manacles on and then lobs the key as far away as he can. As long as it lasts until Sam and Cas make it back.

He hopes they hurry. This is the push he needed, there’s enough of the original Dean knocking around his head at the moment to recognize that he needs to be cured before he does something unforgivable. He’s not sure how long that’s going to last, though.

 

*

 

The long, slow drive back to the bunker is not a triumphant one. Cas spends most of it lying on the backseat of the car, drifting in and out of fitful, nightmare riddled sleep.  Sam’s hands are gripped so tight to the wheel that he’s in danger of leaving a matching set of permanent indents. He’s angry, at himself, at Cas and at Dean. That was the best, probably the only chance they’ll have to get Dean back and under control. He still has no idea what Cas did to scare him off, and the crumpled, shaking figure in the back of the car is in no shape to tell him.

He drives until he’s in danger of careening off the road and pulls in at a motel. He can’t get Cas to wake so he leaves him in the car while he pays for a room, bodily carries him inside when he still won’t stir. He’s concerned for Cas’s health, but he’s too tired to do anything more than arrange him into the recovery position and then collapse onto his own bed, still fully clothed.

He sleeps for seven solid hours and somehow, predictably, feels more tired when he wakes up. Cas is gone, but his bag is still here so Sam chooses to assume he’s gone for food or coffee. He’ll give it an hour before he starts another manhunt.

He checks his phone but he didn’t plug it in overnight and so now it’s dead. Sam snaps.  He flings the phone across the room, upends a bed and punches clean through one of the soft plasterboard walls. He stops after that. His frustration and anger still coil beneath his skin, but he hasn’t got the energy to devote to externalizing it.

He slides down the wall to the floor, head in his hands. He should be good at this by now. When Dean goes, he goes ugly: endlessly slaughtered in a time loop, dragged to hell, caught in the blast of an exploding Leviathan. This time might be the ugliest yet.

Sam doesn’t actually know what’s in Dean’s body right now. Whether it’s some invasive force, some growth he brought back with him from death that has swollen and pushed out the real Dean, caged him off in a corner of his own head, so that he can watch as his hands rip apart people he spent his entire life trying to protect. Or the real Dean might be dead, fully absorbed by this new, demonic version, never to be spat out again.

Cas comes back not long after, laden with coffee and fruit. He looks tired, but healthy enough. No trace of the haggard, skeletal mess he was just under a fortnight ago. He offers Sam an orange, takes a long drink of his coffee and flinches when it burns the roof of his mouth. He surveys the mess in the room without comment and busies himself restoring some sort of order.

Sam’s grateful for his quiet help, his lack of judgment. He watches as Cas packs up their room, offers him more fruit and snags the car keys.

“I’d like to drive today, if that’s all right.”

Sam nods and they slide into the Continental. They’d stumbled across it when they were following Dean’s trail and Cas had been reluctant to leave it behind. He tunes the radio to a classic rock station, noting Sam’s grimace and turning it over to something a little more pop focused.

Neither speaks again until they reach the bunker.

 

*

 

The door has been forced open and the alarm is blaring. They slip into instant alert, Cas drawing his angel blade and Sam wielding Ruby’s knife. They check the perimeter first, assuring themselves that they aren’t going to get herded inside and slaughtered. The door won’t shut, it’s been blasted open pretty violently, but they fix the broken devil’s trap in front of it with a quick application of spray paint, in case they missed something or reinforcements are on the way.

They’re sweeping the ground floor when they hear it. A rattle from the basement. It’s tempting to charge down there but they force themselves to finish searching the rest of the bunker first. The basement is a dead end and there’s every chance this is a trap.

Sam goes down first, Cas a few paces behind him. He’s so focused on guarding their rear that he bumps into Sam when he freezes at the door.

“Heya, Sammy.” Dean’s voice is soft, calm. A world away from the harsh, snapping, biting tones they’ve been hearing for the past four months.

Sam puts his hand out to stop Cas.

“This. It’s a trick, Cas. Don’t.”

Dean is sitting on the floor. There’s a salt circle around the repaired devil’s trap and his hands are manacled.

“It’s not a trick, Sam.”

“No. You did this before. No.”

Cas sidesteps Sam’s hand, squints at Dean thoughtfully. He no longer has the ability to see his soul or his demonic form. He can’t tell if the human sliver of him is the one in control or if it’s just the demon playing games.

“I don’t think this is a trick, Sam.”

“Oh yeah? And what the hell makes you the expert?”

“Even the mention of a devil’s trap used to make him furious. I don’t think he’d willingly put himself in one, not unless he was sincere.”

“Why? Why now? What changed?”

“I—” Cas squirms guiltily as he realizes he hasn’t explained what happened in the forest to Sam. “He did, with my help. There was still a part of his soul that hadn’t fully demonized. I used the last of my grace to purify it. It won’t last long though. It’s already been nearly 24 hours. It’ll be calcifying over already.”

“I can feel it.” Dean speaks up. “It’s like heartburn, like I’ve been chugging acid and it’s rising slowly back up my throat.”

Sam doesn’t know what to do. He checks the devil’s trap quickly, can’t see any obvious flaws or breaks. The salt circle is whole too, and the two lines. It all looks legitimate, but he can’t help the bone deep, long bred suspicion from bubbling up.

“How do I know I can trust you with this?”

“You don’t. I’m sorry.” He shrugs. The gesture is so Dean that it makes Sam want to have faith in him, but he’s been fooled by that before. He looks at Cas, uncertain. Cas nods.

“We have to try, Sam. This is what we wanted, a chance to cure him. Just stay alert, make sure we’re both in the room when he’s being injected, have one of us in here at all other times.”

Sam stows his weapon, rubs his eyes with the heel of his uninjured hand. He’s too tired to think, wants the night to mull it over. He knows that he doesn’t have that luxury.

“Okay. I’ll do it. Does this count as consecrated ground?”

“Yes, it does.”

“Hey, hey, wait. Not you, Sam.” Dean interrupts, fraught.

“You don’t get a say in this.”

“You didn’t finish the trials. Who knows what shit this could rake up.”

Sam spits out a curse.

“Who then? Cas can’t, Garth is a fucking werewolf. We don’t _know_ anyone human anymore.”

“Charlie.”

Sam automatically opens his mouth to argue and then stops, considering. Charlie could work, if she was willing, and if they could get her back from Oz in time. He addresses Cas.

“You keep an eye on him, I’ll go call Charlie, see if she can help.”

 

*

 

“Yo, Winchester.”

Charlie steps through the portal and pulls Sam into a hug. Then she catches sight of his expression, grimacing.

“I take it this isn’t a social call.”

“No. We need your help.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

Sam explains, as concisely and painlessly as he can.

“Wow. Uh, that sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“Just lemme fill Dorothy in and I’ll come on through.”

Sam stays on this side to give them some privacy, hears muffled conversation followed by a scandalized shout as Charlie pops back into the bunker, blushing.

“Alright, let’s get this thing cracking.” She rubs her hands together, irrepressible good cheer shining through.

“You’ll have to purify yourself first. Cas’ll take you to the nearest church, it’s my turn to keep watch on Dean.”

“So, I finally get to meet everyone’s favorite angel?”

“Ex-angel.”

She flinches, apologizing hastily.

“Is he sensitive about that— should I steer clear?”

Sam shrugs.

“Hasn’t really been time to talk about it. I’ll go get him, help yourself to food and drink from the kitchen. It’s a lot of blood to lose; you’ll need to keep your strength up.”

“Gotcha.”

She potters around the kitchen for a bit, nosing through cupboards and drawers until someone coughs behind her.

“Charlie, I assume?”

Cas holds his hand out for a slightly more formal handshake and gets barreled into by an excited redhead. He only hesitates for a moment before he returns the hug.

“It’s nice to see you in the flesh, I’ve heard so much about you.” She says as she disentangles herself.

“And you, Dean speaks very fondly of you. How’s Oz?”

“Oh you know, evil witches, flying monkeys. The whole shebang.”

“Sounds stressful.”

She laughs.

“Yeah, quests are a whole lot more terrifying when it’s your own ass on the line.”

Cas snorts. He’s been through his share of life or death quests.

“So, Sam said you’re taking me to a church? To purify myself?”

“Yes.” He pauses. “Thank you, Charlie, for doing this.”

She shrugs.

“He’s practically family, ‘course I want to help him.”

“All the same.”

“It’s cool. So, shall we roll?”

They step outside. When Charlie sees the Continental she laughs so hard she has to hold her ribs.

“Dude. Were you a pimp in another life?”

Cas narrows his eyes.

“I like it.”

“I’m not one of your hos, alright?”

Cas huffs out a long suffering sigh and unlocks the door to let Charlie in. She talks nonstop as they drive, asking him questions about everything that’s been going on, filling him in on the details of her adventures in Oz. It’s nice, Cas realizes. Just driving along and talking to someone. Sam has been too fraught recently to offer much conversation, understandably.

He finds himself relaxing, laughing along at her jokes. He can see why Dean and Sam like her so much. She’s an easy person to get along with, friendly and happy. When she finds out that he has the entire wealth of human popular culture crammed into his brain she punches him on the arm.

“Bullshit. Prove it, tell me…” she thinks for a moment. “Tell me the lyrics to the song that Lockhart’s cupid sang at Harry in the Chamber of Secrets.”

Cas thinks for a second.

“His eyes are as green as a fresh-pickled toad, his hair is as dark as a blackboard, I wish he was mine, he's truly divine, the hero who conquered the Dark Lord.”

“Damn. You’re good. Um, Gremlins, three rules.”

“No water, keep them away from bright light, no food after midnight.”

She frowns, trying to think of something suitably hard and then crows triumphantly.

“Nenya, Narya, Vilya.”

“Elvish rings of power, forged by Celebrimbor, not by Sauron.”

“Okay, you pass. You’re officially one of the nerdherd.”

Cas smiles.

“I have no idea what that means.”

“It means you’re alright by me.”

“That’s all I could wish for.”

 

*

 

They make it back to the bunker without incident, Cas carefully avoiding prying as to what Charlie confessed to. Instead they fill the car with chatter, nothing deep or profound, but not meaningless by any stretch. They’re getting to know each other. It’s nice, Cas thinks, to have a human friend outside the Winchesters.

They don’t rush in; scoping the bunker carefully to make sure that Dean hasn’t turned rogue in their absence, killed Sam and let in a horde of demons or something. Everything is calm. They find Sam downstairs, sharp eyes tracking Dean’s every movement.

“So, show time?”

Sam nods.

“Cas, you stay with her, I want to get some shut eye.”

“No.” Dean pipes up.

“You don’t get to decide that, Dean.”

“I don’t want you to hear this.”

“Tough.”

“It’s not going to go down easy. I’ve already got enough that’s gonna weigh on my conscience when this is done. Don’t make me add being shitty to you guys in there as well.”

“Wow, thanks, Dean.” Charlie quips.

“You have to be here, you’re gonna hear some nasty shit. I at least wanna minimize the damage.”

“Yeah, I hear ya.”

“We can’t leave you two alone here, Dean.” Cas says, but he says it hesitantly. He just wants to get this done quickly, no time for arguments or debate.

“Check the trap and the cuffs before you go, give her a pocketful of salt, bottles of holy water and a round of bullets with traps on. She’s an expert marksman, she won’t miss.” He turns to Charlie. “I do something you don’t like, right between the eyes, okay. No hesitation.”

She nods.

“Still, Dean.”

“Charlie’s neutral ground. This thing in me has never met her, not really. It fucking hates you two, though.”

“Okay.”

“Cas, no.” Sam objects.

“We’ll be right outside though, Dean. Anything happens and we’ll come in, no matter your desires.”

“Cas, we can’t leave them.”

“Charlie’s spent the best part of a year in Oz. She can handle herself. She’s probably the most together person here.”

He has a point. Sam has a broken arm and feels like he hasn’t slept for days, Cas is still woozy with the effects of falling. Charlie’s the only one hale and hearty.

“Fine.” Sam acquiesces grudgingly. “But you take first watch. I’m going to bed so that when this all turns to shit I’m awake enough to do something about it.”

Cas recognizes his own petulant words thrown back at him. He lets them slide and follows Sam out the room. He stops at the door as a thought occurs, turns back and says,

“May the Force be with you.”

He doesn’t get a laugh, but he at least gets a smile.


	16. Neither Quick Nor Painless

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's an instance of homophobic language towards Charlie in this chapter. If that's something you can't deal with skip the paragraph that begins "He revives on the fourth shot"

“Before we start, I wanna apologize in advance.”

“It’s cool, Dean.”

“Things are probably going to get pretty personal.”

“I’ve got this.”

“If it gets too much, gag me or something.”

“Dean. Stop worrying.”

“Okay.”

“So, you ready to do this?”

“Uh, not quite yet. There’s one thing I need to do first. I’m gonna draw a weapon, don’t scream, I’m not gonna use it on you.”

“You know you’d say that even if you did mean to hurt me.”

“Alright, smartass.”

Dean draws the First Blade slowly from where it was tucked into his waistband and switches it to his left hand. He hefts it a few times, building up his courage, and then puts the tip to the Mark.

“Dean?” Charlie hisses at him.

“I leave this Mark on my arm and we’re back here in a few months. I need this to be a permanent fix.”

“And you think gouging it off is going to do that?”

He shrugs.

“Call it a gut feeling. The Mark and the Blade, they’re connected, we know that. One powers the other. I assumed that meant the Blade was weaker, that it couldn’t be turned against the Mark. Maybe I had it the wrong way around, maybe it’s the _only_ thing that can destroy it— or at least remove it.”

“That sounds pretty tenuous.”

“Nothing else worked, might as well give it a shot.”

He directs her to fill a bucket with holy water and salt, partly to give himself a few more moments to psyche himself up, partly so he has some way of disposing of whatever he pulls out of his arm. She gets it ready all too quickly, sets it down beside him.

Dean takes a deep breath and gouges the point of the Blade down. It doesn’t hurt, not at first. Like he’s digging his fingernail into the dead, hard skin on the backs of his feet. The Mark is dead flesh, demonic tissue. He digs down until he feels pain, until blood starts to well up and flow from his arm. The Blade is heating up in his hand, burning his palm and fingers. It’s fighting back; he takes it as a sign that he’s on the right track. He needs to work his way right through, down to the roots, pull it out like a fungus grown into his veins. He can’t leave a single spore, not even the tiniest foothold for it to sprout back from.

He’s more uncertain now, can’t see what he’s doing, has to operate by feel alone. He probes around blind, gouging into the dead flesh, stopping whenever he feels something, trying to minimize the damage to his own tissue.

He cuts a line up and around, sawing from the center point of the Mark to the tip and then around the edges in a rough oval. When the lines meet he digs the Blade in again, as deep as he can, and he wrenches, levers the red, hard flesh out. The Mark itself is relatively small, but there’s a network of roots grown out under it, dark black in color and hard as stone. He drops the jagged lump of flesh into the bucket with a muffled splash. The water hisses and sizzles, bubbles rushing to the surface.

“Holy water.” He grits out, expecting Charlie to pass some untainted water to him.

She doesn’t. She steps into the circle and pours it on his wound, digging her thumbs in and cleaning as much of the blood and ragged human flesh from it as possible while Dean screams in agony. Once she’s done he carries on, now able to mostly see the remaining roots. It’d be easier to use his fingers, pinch them between his nails and pull until they come loose, but he doesn’t want to take the risk. If the Blade is the key to removing this he needs to use it for the whole process. No half assing it.

Eventually he thinks he’s done, offers the gaping, craterous wound up for Charlie to inspect. She grimaces, washing away more blood and gristle with holy water. She points out a few black specks. Could be grit, could be something worse so he gouges them out too.

He feels woozy, but he isn’t done yet.

“Bandage. Salt.”

Charlie looks around for something suitable, comes up with nothing so she whips off her jacket and rips it up for a field bandage, drawing a devil’s trap onto it to stop him from taking it off. She could go and ask Cas, but she figures there’s a reason Dean waited to do this until the other two were out of the room. She picks up the box of salt, grimaces in empathy with the pain Dean’s about to experience, and pours it into the crater in his arm, filling it completely. Hopefully even if they left a tiny fragment of the Mark in Dean, this’ll be enough to scour it out. She tries to block out his screams as she ties the makeshift bandage around his arm.

Cas hammers on the door.

“Charlie?”

She backs out of the circle and to the door, opens it a crack.

“I’m fine. Dean’s in a little pain.”

Cas’s eyes narrow.

“What did he do? Did he try and attack you?”

“No.”

His eyes narrow even further, only a sliver of white visible.

“He’s done something stupid, hasn’t he?”

“Uh…” She flails.

“You can tell him. Can’t stop me now.” Dean croaks out.

“He cut the Mark off his arm.”

Cas’s eyes snap back open.

“Of course he did.” He says with some degree of venom.

“Speaking of which, uh,” she darts back to the bucket containing the Mark and its roots and carries it, still smoking and bubbling, over to Cas. “It’s in here. Might be best to get it out of the way while I cure him.”

Cas accepts the bucket, looking like he wants to strangle at least one of the two people in the room.

“Charlie. C’mon. Need to start this now.”

“Yeah, uh, see you in a bit, Cas.”

Cas rolls his eyes and closes the door, muttering something about stupid fucking Winchesters.

 

*

 

“You ready for this?”

Dean doesn’t look ready. He’s sweating so badly he looks like he’s been caught in a downpour, hair slicked low against his head and shirt dark with moisture. His hands are shaking and his teeth are gritted against pain that’s only going to get worse the longer it goes on.

“Yeah.” He chokes out.

She carefully draws the first shot of blood, lines up the syringe and plunges it into Dean’s neck before jumping backwards out of the devil’s trap.

Dean lurches upwards, straining at the cuffs, eyes black and snarling in mixed agony and rage. He yanks his arms violently up, trying to pull the chains out from the ground. His failure doesn’t put him off; he keeps on pulling, seemingly unaware of any presence in the room.

He’s still spitting and raging by the time the second dose comes around. Charlie manages to sneak up behind him by throwing a book against the wall. He whips to face it, snarl redoubling, and she darts in and injects him in the back of the neck. There doesn’t seem to be any intelligence to him at the moment, the combination of the pain and anger reducing him to something furious, more hellhound than demon.

He rages for a few more seconds and then slumps to the floor, head hung, eyes closed. Charlie doesn’t trust it, though. She might not have had many encounters with demons per se, but Oz was full of tricksters and villains who played at being people. She’s staying well out of range until she has to.

 

*

 

Everything burns. His veins are full of liquid nitrogen, bubbling through him and scouring him clean from the inside out. He feels a slight prick in the back of his neck and heat dribbles from the point, gaining momentum and flushing the cold from his body. It’s no reprieve, moving too quickly from colder than ice to the flames of hell. He thinks he’s screaming but he can’t tell. He hasn’t got room for anything other than pain right now, can he get back to you later please.

The heat coalesces at a point in his right forearm. It burns here more than anywhere else. He knows it’s because of the salt, vaguely knows that keeping the salt there is important, but he also knows that if he had the strength of body to rip off the bandage and clean out his wound he would without a moment of hesitation. Everyone has a limit, a finite reservoir of tolerance for pain, and his is long dry, the earth cracked and scarred beyond repair.

The heat burns up at the spot on his forearm and then it dissipates like a flash fire. He tenses, fear of the incoming rush of cold stopping him from savoring the suddenly palatable temperature. Nothing changes for a moment, and then another and another. He lies there, body coiled and ready for another onslaught of pain, not allowing himself to relax. That’s when it’ll get him. It’s waiting for him to calm down and then it’s going to spring back. It’s clever. It knows the only thing worse than constant agonizing pain is pain with moments of reprieve in between. Hope and despair and all that Batman crap.

He cracks one eye open and slams it shut again immediately, expecting migraine bright light. He feels okay though, so he opens it again all the way this time, and then follows it with the other. He doesn’t risk doing anything else, though.

 

*

 

They’re three shots down and Dean is lying on the ground, eyes open, body curled up in on itself as best it can with the restrictive chains and manacles. He looks empty, vacant. For the first time Charlie wishes she’d asked more about the process. He looks like he’s turning into a vegetable. Is that normal, or is he going to return to them burned out and brain damaged from the trauma?

She’d anticipated rage and screams and cruel words that cut to the bone, had been prepared, sort of, to deal with that. She isn’t sure how to deal with this, his silence and his dead eyed stares.

His bandage is stained yellow-brown with blood and plasma and god knows what else. She wants to clean it out with holy water, pour more salt into the wound and seal it with a fresh bandage. She’s not sure she’ll be able to risk it though. It’d probably be worse for him if she cleared out the wound and then had to scarper back to safety before she could put fresh salt in it.

He revives on the fourth shot, sitting bolt upright. He zeroes his focus in on Charlie and spits out, “You’re gonna regret this, you fucking dyke.”

She was ready for it, but it still hurts. There’s a part of her that can’t separate Dean’s face from her knowledge that this isn’t him, that he would never, _ever_ say something like that to her.

“Dean—”

“I’m gonna get free and I’m gonna rip you limb from limb.”

“Can it, Winchester.”

She tries for bravado but her voice cracks slightly. He notices and goes on the attack.

“I’m not gonna kill you immediately. I’m gonna cut off your legs, open a portal to Oz and make you watch as I track down and kill that bitch Dorothy. Then I’m gonna flay your skin off, slice by slice, feed it to the fucking flying monkeys.”

He flings a steady and measured stream of abuse at her for the next hour. By the time his fifth injection comes around Charlie’s face is red and her vision is hazy with tears. She’s not going to be able to look at him for a while after this. Gets fully now why he didn’t want Sam or Cas in the room. She can’t begin to imagine the depth and breadth of ammunition buried in Dean’s skull, ready to be turned against the pair of them

When it’s time for the injection he sneers up at her.

“Time for my next shot. And how exactly are you gonna do that?”

“Like this.”

She throws holy water at his face, nips in quickly with the syringe. He lunges at her blindly, eyes smoking and bubbling. His fingers graze her skin as she jumps back but instead of pursuing her, he recoils, as if burned.  He spits onto his hands and rubs at his eyes, cleaning off all traces of holy water and healing them. He examines his hands, focusing on his fingertips like he’s expecting to find something visible there.  He finds nothing and looks up, seeing Charlie.

“You’re still here.” He sounds surprised, a little bored.

“Not going anywhere. You’ve still got three shots to go.”

He makes a noncommittal noise.

“I’m not worried, a lot can happen in three hours.”

She doesn’t ask, _like what_. Knows what the answer will be. That doesn’t stop him, though. He ploughs on regardless.

“Maybe I’ll slip these handcuffs, break the devil’s trap and pour you fat with demon blood, just to see what it does. Maybe it’ll kill you; maybe it’ll just make you malleable. I might work you into a screaming, frothing rage and then take you hunting, find Dorothy or maybe that fairy you were so fond of, Glinda, Gilda, whatever her name is. Arm you and point you in the right direction.”

She’s saved the need to reply by a knock at the door. She backs towards it, cracking it open while still looking at Dean.

“That’s it, eyes on me, bitch.”

“Charlie, stick your hand through the door, I’ve got food for you. Beef and watercress sandwiches, I ground up some iron tablets too, sprinkled it over the top.”

“Is that Sam?” Dean bellows. “WANNA COME IN HERE AND PLAY?”

Charlie grabs the plate and slams the door shut before Sam can try and get inside. She scarfs the food down, legs crossed on the floor.

Dean keeps up his litany of abuse for another fifty six minutes and ten seconds. Yes, Charlie is counting, because if she’s counting the ticking seconds she’s not listening to one of her friends describe in graphic detail how he’s going to carefully peel out the network of nerves in her arm, still connected, and scrape them apart, layer by layer.

After his sixth injection he pauses suddenly, blinking rapidly. The spite almost drops off his face, replaced by confusion.

“Charlie?”

She responds hesitantly, on guard and expecting a trap.

“What’s going on, Charlie? It hurts, why does it hurt?” The panic in his voice is rising. “Charlie, Charlie help me, it’s coming back, the burning, make it stop, my arm, god, my arm, Charlie.”

He scratches at the bandage, notices that the devil’s trap has smudged enough to be useless.

“No Dean, you can’t touch that, leave it.”

“It hurts. IT HURTS.”

He’s howling again, but it’s a different howl to before. A scared child, not a ravening monster. He ignores her instruction and pulls the bandage off, digs his thumb in and flicks out clumps of salt, hissing at the burn on his fingers.

“Okay, Dean. Dean, I can clean your wound, just let me get through, okay.”

He nods, frantic, pushes out his arm. He looks so eager that what she’s about to do breaks her heart. She pours holy water onto the wound, flushing out the remaining grains of salt. He goes limp again and she takes the opportunity to carefully clean the wound, washing it free of yellow bile and examining the whitish flesh carefully. There isn’t a single speck of black left, not that her human eyes can see. Keeping a careful eye on Dean for any twitching or sign of movement she pours more salt into the wound, bandaging it back over nice and tight, fresh devil’s trap drawn onto the fabric.

He wakes again at the seventh shot, jacknifing to his feet. He looks around, spots Charlie and cries out in broken relief.

“You’re here.”

“I’m here, Dean.”

“I killed you, over and over again. Used your blood to break the devil’s trap and went after Sam and Cas.”

“It was a dream, or a hallucination. It doesn’t matter.”

“I said things, didn’t I?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t remember, why don’t I remember?”

“It’s probably for the best.”

“You’re looking at me like you never want to see me again.”

“Maybe not never, but not for a while, yeah.”

He winces.

“Sorry.”

He sits down cross-legged on the floor and gulps, once, twice. She recognizes someone trying to hold back tears. Part of her wants to comfort him, another part wants to find satisfaction in his misery. She tries to do neither, just watch neutrally as he fails to stem the tide and fat, ridiculous tears stream down his face.

“Charlie I--”

“Please, don’t. Not yet. I can’t talk to you yet.”

He nods, gaze roving around from the floor to the walls, anywhere but at Charlie. She’s grateful for that.

They make it to the final shot in mostly silence. Every now and then Dean breaks the calm with a pained whimper or a hitched sob. She can guess what’s going through his mind. From what Sam said, he went pretty far off the reservation. That’s probably all flooding back now. The pain and the regret and the guilt.

He looks up on the dot of the final hour, wiping the tears away with the back of his hand and giving Charlie a tight little smile.

“Guess this is it.”

“Guess it is.”

“If I don’t make it, tell Sam and Cas, y’know.”

“Yeah.”

She plunges the syringe into her arm, draws out the final shot of blood and injects it. Dean grimaces, cricks his neck and the crack echoes around the room.

"Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus. Hanc animam redintegra, lustra. Lustra."

Charlie draws a knife, cuts her palm and holds it to Dean’s mouth, feels his tongue poke out, lick up a drop of her blood.

It burns as it goes down, but it’s not like earlier. It’s a good burn, like whiskey or hot curry. He glows neon pink, tracing like dye through every vein and artery, but it’s not alone. A white glow starts in the center of his body, following the pink, chasing it, hounding it through his flesh and forcing it out of his pores in faint, smoky wisps that vanish into the air.

When the last of the pink has been flushed out the white follows it, exploding out of Dean’s body in a violent burst.

“Dean?”

“Yeah, Charlie.”

“You back?”

“I think so.”

“Wanna prove it?”

“Sure.” He picks the lock on the cuffs, shucks them off and steps out of the trap and across the salt line. There he wobbles, sits back down on the ground. She flicks holy water onto him and smiles when he doesn’t react.

“You okay?”

“Uh. Tired. Like I could sleep for a week.”

“And mentally?”

“Yeah. Okay. Can’t really remember much.”

She knows he’s lying but she lets it slide. There’ll be plenty of time to deal with that later.

“Can you, uh, go get some medical supplies. My arm, it feels pretty grim.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Don’t send Sam and Cas in yet. I don’t want them to see me like this.”

“Okay.”

She retreats, leaving him alone.

 

*

 

He was lying, of course he was.

He remembers what he did. It’s all there, individual memories howling and screaming and fighting their way to the forefront. He thinks his only saving grace, the only reason he isn’t a writhing, babbling mess on the floor is because there are so many that he can’t remember them all at once. The sheer mass of his evil is what saves him as the memories clamor. _Me first. Remember me first. I’m the worst. I’ll crack him._

He can barely stand but his tiredness isn’t physical, an aftermath of the cure. His tiredness is cut deep from the bone. It stems from the raw, aching pit in the center of his chest, afire with hatred and self-loathing.

He knows this kind of wound, and it’s not the kind that happens and then gradually heals. This is the sort of wound that never stops bleeding, that starts big and only ever gets bigger. A black hole of a wound that sucks everything in around it, feeding on itself and reinforcing until there is nothing but gaping, infected flesh.

He wishes they’d killed him. He would rather be dead than feel this suffocating, cloying misery. He wants to pick up the nearest weapon, plunge it into his heart and just let that be the end of the matter. But he can’t. If he does that he’s going to be fast tracked straight to hell. After what he’s done, there isn’t a single point of doubt in his mind. And if he goes to Hell this will all have been for nothing.

He’s done terrible, horrible things, things that mean he isn’t worthy of living, but the pain that’s lodged in his chest is a penance worse than hell. It’s also a penance that only he will suffer. He goes to hell and he gets chewed up and spat back out into the world, leaves the same trail of bodies as before.

The worst thing he can do to himself, without hurting anyone else, is to live. So that’s what he needs to do.

He pushes down the need to collapse to the floor, to grind his face against the cold, hard concrete and pull his misery over himself like a shroud. He can’t afford, doesn’t _deserve_ the luxury of wallowing in his grief and self-loathing. He doesn’t have long before Charlie gets back, before Sam and Cas come for him.

He sneaks out of the room, to the garage. The Impala isn’t there. He remembers why and that brings with it another memory, pushing Sam to the ground and threatening to get him high. He hiccups a rough groan, balls up a rag and stuffs it in his mouth to muffle the sound as his chest heaves and dry, wracking sobs begin to shake his frame.

He jumps into the first car he sees, tries to steady his hands on the wheel but they’re shaking too bad, he’s shaking too bad. He can barely see through the wash of tears in his eyes, knows he’s as likely to crash the car and really die this time, but he has to take that chance. He can’t stay here. Can’t stay with the people who love him and who he’s tried to destroy. Can’t poison them like he poisons everything around him. He’s a gangrenous wound and he can’t be cauterized. Better to just amputate him entirely.

He takes the rag out of his mouth and lets himself cry, inhuman screams of distress that echo tinnily back and forth in the small space as he puts the key in the ignition and drives away.

 

He tries not to look back. He fails, just like he always does.

 

*

 

Charlie bursts back into the basement, arms laden with bandages and sterile wipes and prescription strength painkillers that Sam had managed to scrounge up for her from god knows where. He’d balked at not being able to see Dean. She’d seen the cogs whirring in his brain, why doesn’t he want to talk to me, what happened, is he okay? She’d reassured him, said he was feeling a bit rough and needed to clean himself up, grab about three years’ worth of sleep before he was capable of dealing with questions and guilt and all the rest.

It takes her a moment to realize that Dean isn’t in the room. She tries not to think too much of it, guy hasn’t peed or eaten for what, three months, four? Maybe he needed to use the facilities. She knows though, underneath, that this isn’t what’s happened.

She spots a scrap of paper, folded up on the table.

_Cas & Sam (and Charlie)_

She grabs it, takes it up to the living room where Cas and Sam are waiting, tense and jittery. Wordlessly she hands it to Sam, who opens it with shaking fingers and reads it out loud.

“Sorry. I won’t drag you guys down with me again. Don’t follow me, please. This is one thing family can’t fix. Dean.” 


	17. Smoke Damage

Sam and Charlie come back from the bunker’s P.O. box two weeks later with an envelope. It’s crunched up in Sam’s uninjured hand, white knuckled. Cas can see it, poking out through his fist as he comes in the door. He knows by looking at Sam’s drawn face exactly who it’s from. He tries to wait, let Sam open it up in his own time, but he can’t. Forcing Sam isn’t fair on him, but drawing it out, dragging out this jagged anticipation in his chest isn’t fair to Cas either. And it’s healthier to deal with these things than it is to sit there, worrying and fretting over what might be contained within.

Cas has to pry his fingers open to get it out. Sam doesn’t help but he doesn’t resist. There’s no name. Just the address scrawled out in Dean’s familiar handwriting.

Now that he’s got his hands on it, Cas understands Sam’s hesitance. If it’s good news that’s fine, but what if it isn’t. And on balance, it’s more likely that it isn’t.

Sam glances across at him helplessly. Cas pulls in a deep breath and rips the envelope open, takes out the folded piece of paper inside.

The disappointment when he unfolds it is instant and caustic. When he saw the sheet of paper he hoped for a letter, some sort of explanation or at least an insight into what Dean’s been up to, his state of mind.

Well, now they know what he’s thinking, like it was that much of a stretch to imagine.

It’s an article, printed out from the Chicago Tribune website.

_CHICAGO IN MOURNING: MYSTERY KILLER GOES ON RAMPAGE_

It’s a brutal read but Cas forces himself. He needs to know every last detail, what happened, the numbers. He doesn’t blame Dean, it wasn’t him, he was all but demon when they found him, but it’s clear from this that Dean blames himself.

He’s halfway through when Sam tears the piece of paper from him, rips it up into tragic confetti and throws it into the garbage, stamping furiously back to his room.

Charlie makes to go after him, but he slams the door with such fury that she spins on her heels and returns to the room she shares with Dorothy instead.

Cas waits until she’s gone and then he grabs the can, takes it into his own bedroom and locks the door. He tips the contents out on the floor, picking out the banana skins and clumps of hair and returning them, examining everything carefully to make sure no scrap of paper remains unfound.

Some of the pieces are smudged, some are sodden with gunk, but he carefully rebuilds the sheet, like a rancid jigsaw puzzle. He wipes off what he can and fetches some tape and a plain sheet of paper from his desk. He carefully transfers each scrap of the printout onto it, laminating them with carefully aligned layers of tape.

He remembers the title and the website, could easily go online and find it if he wants to read, but that isn’t the point.

The point is this is contact from Dean. Maybe the last he’ll ever get.

 

*

 

It isn’t the last. This time Cas is the one who picks it up from the post office. Sam’s waiting at the door with a hungry look in his eye when he gets back. Cas almost opened it in the car, sat in the parking lot for nearly an hour staring at it, fingers twitching and desperate. It’s from Dean and if Sam sees it he might rip it up and throw it in the trash again. But even if he does, opening it without Sam would be cruel, and Cas doesn’t want to be cruel.

So he stuffs it in his pocket and drives back to the bunker with his foot twitching dangerously, as far over the speed limit as he dares.

And now he’s standing, holding out the envelope to Sam who’s looking at it like it’s some combination of deadly poison and all his Christmases come at once.

“I won’t destroy it.”

“I fixed the other one.”

“Oh.”

He reaches out, balls his hand into a fist and pulls it back with a grimace.

“You do it.”

Cas does, slipping his thumb under the seal and pulling across. He’s learned how to open letters with the least amount of damage now. He’d asked Charlie, pulled back from her pitying face as she worked out why Cas wanted to know.

It’s another printed article.  

_A LOCAL MASSACRE, A NATIONAL TRAGEDY._

_Candles were lit across the nation today as the American people came together in mourning for the lives lost during the West Bar Massacre…_

They both read it all the way through this time. Sam fists his hands into his hair.

“He’s not coming back, is he?”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yeah, I do. This is him saying goodbye.”

“He’s already said goodbye. This is him letting us know he’s still alive.”

“Oh yeah, real fucking gracious of him.”

“At least it’s something.”

Sam is so angry. He’s been angry since they found the note. He seems to crash around the bunker in an almost permanent state of barely contained fury. Plates have been smashed, accidentally and on purpose. They didn’t have a TV for a few days because Sam saw a news bulletin on the West Bar killer and put his fist through the glass. They keep the new TV permanently tuned to harmless networks, ones that don’t show the news, or Dr. Sexy, or a hundred other things. You don’t realize how much TV shows remind you of someone until you have to.

Cas was ragged for the first few days. Locked himself in his room, buried his face in his pillow and tried to forget that Dean had ever existed. It went about as well as you might expect. By the time the immediate grief had settled into a numbness and he came out he found the bunker’s numbers had swelled by one.

Charlie had gone through the portal intending to say goodbye to Dorothy, for a while at least. There was no way she could leave Sam and Cas to wallow together in their own misery or tear each other apart. Dorothy had nodded, shrugged, said there was nothing immediate that needed her attention in Oz and slipped right past Charlie and through the portal to the bunker with a smug smile.

The smile hadn’t lasted long.

 

*

 

Cas realizes he doesn’t like feeling numb, it reminds him too much of when he was under Naomi’s control. It’s why he flips suddenly from avoiding reminders of Dean and starts reveling in them. He takes every chance to reopen the wound because at least if he feels like the world is ending he’s feeling something. And he knows that this sort of self-torture is exactly what Dean is doing, wherever he is. It’s like a connection, now that he can’t hear his prayers.  You’re out there, tearing new holes in yourself. I’m here, doing the same.

He tortures himself with little thoughts. Today he’s making himself remember all the times he left Dean, times he was dead or just absent. He wonders if Dean felt like he does now, if it felt like abandonment, or if it just slid off. He swings from one to the other, basking in the two different kinds of hurt as he rakes them up and runs his hands over every inch.

He forces himself to settle back into numbness when he drives. He’s coping badly, but he’s not suicidal, doesn’t want to flame out and crash the car because he can’t see through his tears. He makes the same journey at least once every day, parks outside the post office and pulls in deep, shuddering breaths. It’s the moment he feels most human. A tumult of fear, hope and anticipation verses the usual flat mess of despair.

He’s been in enough that they recognize him. He doesn’t usually recognize them— either he’s too out of it or maybe there’s been talk of him in the break room or whatever. That scruffy, mad-haired, wild-eyed man who comes at least once a day, sometimes two or three times.

They’ve stopped asking him if he wants alerts, text or email. He just stares at them blankly for a moment and turns back to his box.

Today there are two packets. One thick, probably a book for Sam or some mail order comics for Charlie. The second is slim. He picks that one out first, a prickling feeling of relief and anticipation starting in the pit of his stomach and flooding out to his fingertips as he recognizes Dean’s handwriting.  He snags the other package, throws himself into the car and speeds home.

It’s another article.

_WEST BAR MURDERER’S BODY REMAINS UNFOUND_

It’s shorter than the others but still manages to go into graphic detail. It describes the chase and the injuries he sustained, hints at the possibility of a bent officer assisting him— one who killed the other cops at the scene.

They scour it carefully while Charlie and Dorothy mill around in the background, pretending to be busy but keeping an eye on their reactions. It’s nothing they don’t know, but they can at least see from the postmark that Dean was alive three days ago. It’s not great, but it’s the best they have.

 

*

 

The next letter comes two days later, containing a four paragraph article. There’s another one, same length, a day after that. A two-week gap leaves Cas frantic— convinced that Dean is dead, before postal silence is broken with a few paragraphs speculating about the motives behind the still elusive killer’s rampage.

Three days later the last article arrives, although article is a very loose word to describe what they receive. It’s from the Tribune, a cutting from the actual paper instead of an online printout. It’s a single sentence. A sidebar afterthought.

_Search for West Bar murderer’s body abandoned._

 

*

 

“Cas?...Cas? CAS!”

“What?” He jerks around, startled out of whatever little world he’d been lost in.

“We’re going shopping. Any requests?” Charlie asks.

“No.”

“You don’t wanna come with?”

“No.”

“Sure? You haven’t been out the house for nearly a month.”

“No, thanks.”

“We’ll be going past the post office.”

“No.”

“Cas, please. You need to get out of the bunker.”

“I don’t _need_ to do anything.”

“Cas, come on.”

“I’m fine.” He informs her shortly and retreats back to his room. It’s a mess. A nest of scattered torturous memories. It’s been nearly three months since Dean’s last letter. A month since Cas had first sunk into his glaze-eyed funk. Charlie keeps expecting him to turn to drugs to numb the pain, like the Croatoan future version of Cas that she’d read about. The moment she came back to the bunker she’d enlisted Dorothy and set about hiding the narcotics, keeping a list of everything they had and where so that she’d know if a problem started to develop. Charlie needn’t have worried. Cas doesn’t want to numb the pain, with drugs or sex or booze or fucking redirectional therapy. He wants to feel every last burn. Something that unfortunately gets harder as time goes by.

He ignores Sam’s first knock on the door. Tells him to fuck off on the second. Resorts to some really quite personal insults on the third. Sam has started moving forward, seething rage replaced with something else, calmer and more measured. He’s getting better at this. Cas isn’t.

Eventually he gives up on shouting. Cas thinks he’s gone away until he sees something slide under the door. He’s given up hounding him verbally and moved onto the written word. Great.

He shuffles over and picks it up anyway, anything to get a bit of peace. It’s not a letter, berating or otherwise. It’s a photograph printed on stiff cardboard, a postcard. A couple walking along the seaside, towards a brilliant orange sunset. It looks idyllic, pleasant, except dominating the right hand corner and framing the sunset is a mass of thunderous black storm clouds. Maybe it’s harmless. Maybe the contrast of yellow heat and stormy black looks good in a photo. Maybe it’s just Cas’s state of mind that he sees clouds and thinks of danger.

Cas frowns at it, wondering why Sam would choose to show him this of all things. He flips it over. Along the bottom, in faded grey italics, is printed the name of the place it was taken. Galveston, Texas. Cas doesn’t notice that straight away though, first his eyes track to the address on the right, Dean’s familiar script, and then across to the body of the postcard, where the message is supposed to go.

There’s just one thing written there, a number.  

“8,000+”

Cas frowns at it for so long that by the time he comes out of his room Sam has retired to the kitchen. He looks up from his plate of pasta as he hears footsteps.

“Dude. You need to shave.”

“It’s from Dean.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s been three months.”

“Yeah.”

“I thought he was dead.” There’s no emotion in his tone. Just a statement of fact.

“Yeah, I know.”

“You were so angry.” He sounds bewildered.

“Yeah.”

“Why aren’t you angry?”

“I’m tired of being fucking angry. He’s gone, he’s doing what he wants— for once. I know he’s alive, what more do you want, Cas?”

Cas scowls at the postcard, flicking it between the words and the picture. He wants him _here_ but he can’t think of a way to say that and not sound selfish and stupid. The insinuation that what Dean wants is to be far away from them might have stung a while ago, but now it barely even chips at the numbness. It’s been a while since anything really broke through to Cas. Time heals, and apparently obsessive re-examining of the most painful moments of your life lapidifies your emotional center.

“What do you think it means?”

He flips the postcard back to writing side up and waves it at Sam.

“I don’t know. It’s a good sign though. Nothing more about the murders.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Cas scrutinizes it. The number is in smudged, scrawling cursive, like it was written in a hurry or a state of upset. The address is in a different color pen and in block capitals. Either written at another time, or intended to look like it was. The postmark is from Sierra Vista.

“8,000 plus? Is this another one of your codes? Dean said he taught me them all, but he might have forgotten one, or not wanted me to know what it meant.”

“He taught you th—? Never mind. No, it’s not a code.”

“Guys.” Charlie’s voice interrupts, hesitantly. Which is a warning in itself. “You said 8,000, Galveston, Texas, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Um. I did a quick Google.”

“It’s not good news.” Cas predicts, flatly.

“In 1900 there was a, uh, hurricane. Deadliest in US history.”

“And it killed 8,000?” Sam guesses.

“Well, says here it was between six and twelve thousand. Official reports usually peg it at around eight though.”

“Oh.”

“So much for his state of mind.”

Cas puts the postcard down carefully and picks up his car keys. Sam, Charlie and Dorothy have a quick, muted discussion which ends with Sam and Dorothy being pushed after him by a grim faced Charlie.

“You don’t have to come.” He mutters. “I’m only going to the store.”

“We feel like a ride.” Sam offers.

“You just got back from a ride.”

“We feel like another one, being cooped up here, y’know.”

Cas snorts disbelievingly but lets them tag along. The atmosphere inside the Continental is strained, and Sam notices Cas making some odd detours that’ll extend their journey by miles. The derisive squint on Cas’s face makes him think this might be a deliberate move, a punishment.

When they finally get to a not-even-remotely-local Office Depot knockoff, Cas scarpers, slipping out of their sight as soon as he can. They search for him futilely, figuring he probably won’t manage to get up to anything too nefarious— it’s an office supply store, not a fucking gun shop.

He meets them back at the car, bag bundled up where they can’t see. Sam asks, Dorothy retains an air of indifference. She doesn’t really know Cas, has only seen the roller coaster of prickly emotionless drone and sobbing ridiculous mess. She’s a clever girl, she knows those aren’t his only skins, but until he decides to finally show something else there’s not much she can do other than roll with it.

 

*

 

Cas is in one of the abandoned rooms, sequestered off for his use, when the next card comes. It’s been a week and he’s still keeping Sam in the dark as to what he’s doing. He knocks on the door, shouting out, “something from Dean.”

Cas wrenches the door open and pulls him in.

It’s a command center. Center stage is a huge map of the United States. There are a handful of pins in the map, but Sam doesn’t get the time to clock and categorize them before Cas is snatching the postcard out of his hand.

It’s a vintage picture, a painted shoreline with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, two seagulls in the foreground, looking down on the scene below.

“He’s staying by the sea.” Sam notes. “Maybe, ah, after the whole demon thing he finds it soothing, y’know. Quench the hellfire with saltwater?”

Cas looks at him, considering. He turns back to the card and then dredges up some vague pity from his emotionless torpor.

“He posted it from Albuquerque.”

“Oh.”

“The number, 3,000. Casualties?”

Sam taps it into his phone.

“Earthquake, triggered a fire.”

Cas moves back to the wall, dipping his hands in the pots on a nearby cupboard and picking out two different pins. The first is a blue plastic drawing pin and the other is flat headed and brass. The plastic one is pressed into San Francisco and the brass into Albuquerque. As Sam watches, Cas picks up a pen, drawing an arrowed line between them.

“What’s the significance?” He asks, because it’s easier than puzzling out Dean’s motives at this point.

Cas steps back from the map for a moment, considering.

“White is for where articles were posted from, blue is where the postcards depict, and the brass pin connected to each postcard is where they were postedfrom. I’m drawing lines, arrowed in his direction of travel.”

“You’re tracking him.”

“Yeah.”

“You think that’ll help you see where he’s going next?”

“No.”

“Then—”

“I just want to know where he’s been.”

“Do you want to go find him, Cas? We can try, we can go out there, hunt him.”

“Why? He doesn’t want us to.”

“But you—”

“It doesn’t matter, Sam.”

Over the next handful of months they get postcards from Okeechobee (3,000), New York (2,996) Hawaii (2,466) Johnstown (2,209) and Chenière Caminada (2,000).

A small packet creates some excitement, tamped down when they realize it’s full of more postcards. Alabama (2/1,833), Florida (14/1,833), Georgia (2/1,833), Kentucky (1/1,833), Louisiana (1,577/1,833), Mississippi (238/1,833) and Ohio (2/1,833). They flick through them quickly before they figure out that it’s the combined death toll of hurricane Katrina.

“At least he’s being thorough with his research.” Sam jokes.

Dorothy cracks a half smile, but no one else feels like laughing.

 

*

 

Cas laughs. It’s not a bitter laugh. It’s genuine, small but earthshattering.

“Cas?” Charlie asks.

“What?” The smile disappears and he turns to her like he’s worried, like he thinks he’s done something wrong.

She covers quickly.

“You don’t have to look like that. Just this is one of my favorite films, didn’t think you’d be a fan.”

“Surely you can’t be serious.” He hits back.

She replies automatically, not even considering that he might not get it.

“I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.”

They both laugh.

“I had it in my head, because of Metatron, but it’s different out loud. It’s funny.”

She knew from the quiz she landed on him that he knows all of pop culture, had assumed it meant he couldn’t laugh at the classics— old jokes and all. Okay, had assumed that amongst other things, meant he couldn’t laugh. She shoots him a split mouthed grin and unpauses the film.

_Airplane_ is hilarious, and Cas only laughs once. But once is better than before. Charlie doesn’t think she’s heard him laugh at all since Dean left eight months ago. It’s progress. They’ll take any kind of progress.

 

*

 

Two weeks after Cas’s first laugh in over half a year, another communiqué arrives from Dean. It’s not a postcard this time, it’s an envelope. When Cas sees it first he worries that it’s another article, that they’re backtracking. Thankfully he’s wrong. Inside is another postcard— from New London, Texas with “319” scrawled on the back. It’s not the only thing in the envelope. There’s a receipt for a cola, burger and fries from some joint called Redline Burger in Dallas. Ordinary enough as far as Sam’s concerned. And fucking blessed for it. Maybe it means he’s getting better, might be swinging back their way.

Cas flips it over, sees writing on the back.

“The pie smelled like feet.”

They don’t know what to do with that. The first actual words they’ve had since he left. He’s talking to them, but what the fuck does he mean. Is it a bad thing? Dean rejecting pie always feels like a bad thing. Or is it just him explaining why it isn’t on his receipt— I’m not punishing myself, it just looked shit.

Five fucking words and Sam and Cas— and to a lesser extent Dorothy and Charlie— are spinning around.

 

*

 

Now every postcard comes with something else. At first it’s just receipts for shitty diners, little comments on the back.

“Worst burger ever.”

“They gave me a salad instead of fries. Ew.”

“I never wanna see a milkshake again.”

“Seven kinds of pie and I ate them all. No regrets.”

“What kind of monsters water down ketchup?”

“Cas’d like the burgers here. You should tell him, wherever he is.”

That last one stings, but Cas knows he has a track record. He shouldn’t be surprised Dean thinks he high-tailed it.

He doesn’t savor the pain any more. Doesn’t pull it down into his core and try and nurture it. He’s moving on, getting better. A little bit of him resents that, the rest is just so fucking tired.

 

*

 

The receipts stop after a few months and are replaced by other things, each with a little commentary. A used pass for Yellowstone park has, “Saw some real wolves. Much cooler than werewolves. No offence to Garth.” It’s followed a few days later by a large package. It doesn’t come attached to a postcard and it was posted from the same place as the previous letter. Suggests maybe he’s slowing down, stopping even.

Inside they find a bubble wrapped shot glass urging people to _Save the Moose!_ and a packet of bird themed playing cards.

“Thought you could combine your twin pleasures of being all save the whales and doing shots. The cards are for Cas, next time you see him. Something to keep him entertained on all those long journeys, y’know, seeing as he can’t instatravel anymore.”

The next package has a postcard and a death toll in it, which dampens their hopes of recovery somewhat. But it also has something a little more promising. There are three additional items. A used day pass for the Grand Canyon, an unused yearly pass, and a note.

“Shit man. This place is beautiful. Thought you should see it for yourself.”

He exhausts his fascination for the big tourist stuff pretty quickly, moves on to weird, roadside attractions. They receive a chunk of twine from the world largest ball—“They think this is big they should see the hairballs you drop.”Two t-shirts arrive from the Cadillac Ranch—“Bet Cas’s taste in clothes is even more hideous than this _._ ”

There’s a long gap, nearly a month, before the next delivery of hideous gift shop schwag arrives. A pair of Lucy the elephant baseball caps with a rather sulky note—“They wouldn’t let me sit on their stupid elephant so I snuck at back at night. Round one to Dean.”

In a steady trickle comes a pair of commemorative spoons from Coral Castle in Florida—“Sorry, they only had them in normal human size, Sam” _;_ a handful of loam and grass from Foamhenge—“No souvenir shops, I had to make do” _;_ two Fear No Weevil Christmas decorations from the Boll Weevil Monument—“These people practically worship bugs get me out of here” _;_ a bag of nuts and a box of peppermint shortbreads from the World’s Largest Pistachio—“I got you nuts. Nuts are healthy, right? The peppermints have a long expiration date on them, I checked, Cas can pick them up ~~whenever~~  if he swings by and they should still be okay.”

Cas reads the note with a tense little frown, grabs the bag of peppermints and takes them to his room. He puts them on his dresser with all of Dean’s other little gifts. The cards are his favorite, worn now and dog eared from all the times he’s taken them out of the box, run his fingers along the edges and thumbed through them, looking at the pictures and memorizing the little paragraphs of information beneath. His favorite is the flammulated owl, because in the blue, white and black speckles of its feathers Cas can see the stars.

 

*

 

There’s nothing for another few weeks and then Sam finds a little slip of paper in their P.O. Box.

“Your package was too big to be delivered, please check with an official behind the counter.” He reads out loud, trying to stifle a groan. If Dean’s sent him a box of nails from the world’s largest scrapyard or something he’s going to track him down and use them to secure his feet to the fucking floor.

The woman behind the counter hands him a medium sized parcel box and he shakes it curiously, relieved when it doesn’t make a metallic clink. He takes it back to the bunker, eyeing it in the passenger seat the whole time like it’s about to explode.

He heaves it onto the kitchen table and slices it open with his hunting knife.  He pulls out handfuls of moose shaped chocolates. On the top is a slip of paper.

“With love from all of us at Len Libby chocolatiers, home of Lenny, the world’s only life sized chocolate moose.”

Cas laughs, and gets a face full of moose shaped chocolates for his trouble.

 

*

 

A year to the day since Dean’s massacre a lone postcard arrives. Chicago, Illinois (43). Under the number there’s a little blurb, copied down off a website.

“The West Bar Massacre is rated the 266th worst disaster in the United States by total casualties _._ ”

It’s the last time Dean writes to them.

 

*

 

They give it two months and then they start to panic. Charlie scours the internet for the faintest sign; Sam plugs himself into the hunter networks. Three days of searching and they have nothing to show for it, on the fourth they start to pack. Cas is in the kitchen, making salt rounds, when he hears a quiet rap on the door.

He frowns. Sam and Charlie are definitely still in the bunker but he hasn’t seen Dorothy all day. Maybe she went out to pick up some food. He hoists a gun from the table, marches to the door and opens it a crack, pointing the barrel out.

“Who is it?” He asks gruffly.

“Whoa, whoa, there.”

Cas drops the gun and whips the door open.

“Dean.”

Dean reels, like someone’s punched him in the gut. He looks older, much more than a year older. There are rough bags under his eyes, new crow’s feet digging at the sides of his face, a weariness to the way he holds himself. He looks like a man who’s been running for years and has just realized he needs to stop before it kills him.

“I thought you’d be long gone.” He says quietly.

“Someone had to stay.” The bitter words slip out before Cas can censor them.

Dean flinches.

“This…this was a bad idea.” He mutters and tries to turn away.

Cas grabs him by the arm, pulls him back and into a desperate, hungry kiss. Dean doesn’t respond for a moment, stunned, and then he surges forward, hands coming up and fisting in Cas’s hair, holding on to him like if he keeps a tight enough grip it’ll stop him from falling apart.

Eventually they break apart, panting. Dean grasps onto the lapels of Cas’s jacket, dropping his head onto his shoulder. He pulls in deep breaths, letting the unfamiliar smell of human Cas surround him, shampoo and sweat and gunpowder.

“I wasn’t expecting that.” He mumbles into the fabric. “I was expecting a punch.”

Cas’s arms fold around him, squeezing him tighter than strictly necessary, not wanting to let go.

“It’s so good to see you.”

“Yeah, man. Yeah. You too.”

He pulls back, breaks Cas’s embrace and looks at him, tapping his cheek with a knuckle.

“You look good, man. So much better than when I last saw you.”

“Sam’s been cooking. Lots of salads, lentils.”

“You’ve been here for a while?”

“Since you left.”

“Oh. So, you, uh, you saw the notes?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you um, like the presents?”

“I like the taste of peppermint.”

“Yeah?”

“And the playing cards, they were a nice thought.”

“Didn’t quite make up for running out on you though, I guess?”

“No.”

He scrubs at his eyes with one hand.

“How’d Sam take it?”

“Better than me. He was angry, for a bit. He’s better now.”

“H—how did you take it?” Dean draws in on himself, guiltily.

“I’d rather not.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Do you want to come in? Sam’s here, Charlie and Dorothy too.”

Dean looks up, hopeful.

“You think they’ll want to see me?”

“Of course, Dean.”

Cas leads him into the living room. He keeps looking back, making sure Dean really is there, that he’s not going to vanish. His right hand twitches, wants to reach back and grab Dean’s, but he doesn’t. He already kissed him; he won’t do anything else until he knows what Dean wants. Why he’s here. He can’t do this if Dean’s going to leave. He was starting to feel normal. He’s not going back to those first few months. He was _better._

“Sam! Charlie! Dorothy!” He shouts out, replies and “in a minute”s filtering through.

Sam is the first person into the room. He files in, duffle in hand.

“Don’t worry about finishing the rounds, we’ve enough for now. Can make more in the motel when we get to Maine.”

“Heya, Sammy.”

His head snaps up and he freezes, doesn’t know what to do or say. Dean steps forward, goes in for a hug, and gets a punch for his trouble.

“There’s your punch,” mutters Cas.

Dean rubs his jaw.

“I deserved that.”

“Yeah, you did.”

Sam grabs him in a bear hug, crushing his ribs.

“But it’s still good to see you.”

Sam starts to cry as Charlie and Dorothy enter the room, and then there’s no hope. The whole scene devolves into a mess of hugs and tears, relief salving over the hurt and frustration for now. Cas hangs back a bit, telling himself that he’s already said his hello to Dean, it’s time to let the others have their turn. It’s a little bit of the truth, but it’s not the whole thing.

When the initial melee has calmed down, Dean turns to him, a tentative expression crossing his face. He’s noticed Cas hanging back, figures there’s something wrong. He reaches out to take Cas’s hand, but Cas jerks it away and Dean flinches.

“Shit, I’m sorry, man. I thought—”

“Are you staying?”

The atmosphere sharpens immediately, the other three all zeroing in intently on their conversation.

“What?” Dean can’t be surprised, has to have known this question was coming.

“I won’t do this if you’re gonna leave.”

Dean’s expression softens; he takes Cas hand and smiles at him.

“I’m not going anywhere, not if you guys want me back.”

“Do you promise? Because I’m not doing that again.”

“I promise, Cas. I’m not going anywhere.”

Cas nods slowly, relieved, and then leans over to kiss him, softly and tenderly. The others groan. Sam throws a pillow, and Charlie moans at them to get a room. Cas and Dean simultaneously lift their unclasped hands and give their audience the finger, to whooping laughter and cheers.

 

It’s been a long road, and there’s been a lot of damage. The things they’ve done aren’t going to just go away because Dean’s come back, they know that. It’s going to take hard work and time to patch everything up, but they’re all back together, they’re all prepared to stay put and work at this. It’s a start.


	18. This is a Place Where I Feel at Home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from the Cinematic Orchestra song, _[To Build a Home](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG2bTlOcLnE)_

**Two years later.**

Dean wakes screaming. It’s not an uncommon occurrence these days. Cas grabs hold of him, pulling him tight against his chest until he stops struggling. He’s gained more than a few bruises and black eyes this way, but he won’t leave Dean to just ride the panic out. It lasts longer if he’s left alone. They tried it once, to see if Cas’s intervention was helping or hurting. Dean screamed for nearly half an hour before Cas couldn’t bear it any more.

“Sorry.” The first thing he does when he comes back to himself is apologize. Cas relaxes his grip, mouthing tenderly at the back of his neck.

“You can’t help it.”

“Doesn’t make it any less shitty.”

He shifts in Cas’s arms so that he’s facing him, kisses him, gently at first and then harder. His nightmares always leave him on edge, needing to reaffirm that this is real, what he’s living now, and the wrath and blood and fire of his dreams are just that. Shadows of his past trying to haunt him.

Dean pushes Cas over onto his back and moves his focus to his collarbone, drawing his teeth over it and then biting a trail down his chest and belly until he’s nestled between his legs. He’s only half hard so Dean licks at him, firmly teasing his cock into filling so that he can really get on with what he wants.

He swallows Cas down as far as he can, reveling in the whimper and the way Cas arches his back, thrusting up. Dean groans as the head of Cas’s cock hits the back of his throat; the bass rumble earning another approving noise from Cas as he gently weaves his long fingers into Dean’s hair. Dean encourages Cas to fuck his throat for a few seconds and then pulls off with a delicious popping noise.

“Dean..” Cas doesn’t whine exactly, but it’s clear he’s not happy with the sudden lack of wet heat around his cock.

“Fuck me.” He mumbles, nuzzling gently at Cas’s cock with his cheek.

Cas groans and sits up, interlacing their hands and pulling Dean into his lap so that he can kiss him again, a possessive wave of heat washing through him as he tastes his own pre-come on Dean’s tongue. He lets go with one hand and fumbles blindly at the dresser next to him, eventually locating the bottle of lube. He opens Dean up, as tenderly as he can while still being quick, tongue fucking him at the same time and swallowing down his moans and whimpers.

“S’nough” Dean slurs into his mouth.

Cas doesn’t ask if he’s sure. Dean knows his own limits, and on nights like this Cas makes it his job to give him exactly what he needs.

He flips them over; laying Dean out on his back because he knows Dean enjoys being manhandled more than he likes to admit. Dean arches like a cat and then stretches out his arms, winding his wrists together and clutching at the headboard as Cas lines up and pushes in. He starts off gently enough, thrusting deep but slow, until Dean braces against the bed and pushes himself down suddenly.

“C’mon.”

Cas acquiesces, grasping Dean firmly by the hips and fucking into him with rapid, brutal thrusts.  Dean moans, head lolling back, and he stops pushing now, arms resting limply over his head as Cas fucks him rough and thorough. Under the noises of the headboard slamming into the wall and the mattress springs creaking Cas can hear Dean’s choked off gasps, a litany of curses, groans and quietest of all, Cas’s full name, pushed out between breaths, like a secret or a blasphemy. Like to tenderly whisper Cas’s name while he’s getting fucked is a heresy worthy of being thrown back into the pit.

“You don’t have to whisper, Dean.” Cas pants out, wanting to hear every last noise he can pull from Dean’s throat. Cas is close now. He can feel sparks of warm pleasure building to a crescendo, his body lighting up from the inside. He relinquishes his grip on Dean’s hips and drags his nails down his sides, clawing rough, red scratches that’ll last for days. Dean howls, tensing and coming with a violent punch all over his stomach. He locks up, rigid, and clenches around Cas’s cock. It’s enough to push him over the edge too, and he comes inside Dean with a soft cry.

Once he’s come down from his blissful high, Cas pulls out gently. He doesn’t want Dean waking up in the morning itchy and irritated by dried come, and he knows he can’t stand being alone on one of his bad nights, even for something as brief as a shower. So he lifts Dean’s legs, hooking them over his shoulders so that he can reach his messy hole with his tongue. He licks him clean, slowly and tenderly, as Dean mumbles and sighs in pleasure. When he’s done he settles Dean back on the bed, leaning over him, hands on either side next to his hips, to do the same to the come on his stomach.

When Cas has finished he lies down beside Dean, head pillowed on his now cleanish chest, and gently runs his fingers up and down Dean’s soft cock, reveling in his shudders as he enjoys the jackknifed aftershocks. When that becomes too much for Dean, when he’s tensing from oversensitivity rather than knife-edged pleasure, Cas stops and moves back up the bed. Dean smiles sleepily at him, and then folds himself into Cas’s arms, burying his face in his chest and pulling in long, deep breaths. Surrounding himself with the scent of home.

This is a familiar routine of theirs. After his nightmares the thing that Dean needs most is intimacy. He needs to be touched, he needs to be fucked, and he needs, most of all, to be held. He needs someone to wrap him up in their arms so tight that he can pretend the outside world doesn’t exist. He needs to relinquish some of the control and be shown that everything is okay, that there is someone here for him; even after all of the things he’s done. Cas is more than happy to do that for him.

 

*

 

Dean wakes up miserable and withdrawn, his scar aching worse than it has for months. He extricates himself from Cas’s arms, throws on his robe and goes to stand on their porch. He nearly doesn’t bother with the robe, they don’t have any neighbors for miles around, but it’s edging towards fall and it’s cold enough to steam his breath, so he’s glad he did. Moping is all very well, but it’s very hard to look dignifiedly melancholy when you’re freezing your nipples off.

He knows today is just going to be one of those days. He’s been getting better— he hasn’t broken down screaming at the sight of a knife for a long time, but it’s a slow process. Sometimes he thinks he won’t ever be fully okay. He certainly doesn’t think he deserves to be okay, but that’s something Cas is helping him work through.

He wonders how Sam is doing. They haven’t talked for a few days. Sam’s been busy and so has Dean. He doesn’t hunt any more, even the idea makes him feel nauseous, but knocking this house into shape has been a full time job so far. They got hold of it for pennies, but there was a reason for that. It was little more than a leaky shell. He likes it. He’s always been good with his hands, building things helps him relax.

Speaking of which, the decking is warped and loose. He shuffles inside, not even bothering to be quiet. Cas sleeps like the dead for the most part. Only three things wake him up before he’s ready. Coffee, being rimmed, and Dean’s nightmares.

Dean grabs his tools and goes back outside, crouching down and examining the boards. Some of them are warped beyond repair, and he starts to pull them up. Those that can be saved he hammers carefully back into place. After about a half hour he becomes aware of someone watching him and turns around. Cas is standing in the doorway, dressed in loose fitting jeans and a ratty old t-shirt, nursing a cup of coffee and watching Dean with a little smile.

“What?”

“DIY in your robe?”

“Yeah. Got a problem?”

“No. Crazy old man is a good look on you.”

“Screw you.”

“You okay, Dean?”

“Been better, y’know.”

“Yeah, I do.”

He puts down his cup and comes over.

“Anything I can do to help?”

“Sure. Hold these nails. I’ll try not to break your fingers.”

“As long as you try.”

Dean smiles. Only a little, but it’s still a victory of sorts.

They hammer down all the boards that need it, lift those that don’t. When they’ve done all they can for now, until one of them can make the trip into town and get hold of some decent wood, they head inside. Dean insists on making lunch and Cas knows better than to argue.

“Aren’t you supposed to be heading to the bunker today?” Dean asks, as he slices bread for sandwiches.

“Sam won’t mind if I don’t.”

“Don’t stay on my account.”

Cas goes over to where Dean’s standing, turns him around and rests their foreheads together.

“You’re upset.”

“I’m a grown man, Cas. I’ll be fine.”

“I won’t be. I’ll worry about you.”

Dean knows what he’s doing. Turning this around so it seems like Cas is the issue here, not Dean. Even though he’s aware of what’s going on, it still helps.

“Yeah, okay. Stay.”

Cas smiles and twines their hands together. Dean responds by burying his head in the join between Cas’s neck and his shoulder. He wants to cry. For no fucking reason. He hates these days. Doesn’t know what to do with himself. Part of him wants to find something to tear apart, nothing living; just a fucking cabinet to smash or a tree to chop to kindling, but the urge still disgusts him enough that he feels bile rising in his throat.

“Shall I call Sam, or do you want to?” Cas’s voice breaks through his maudlin thoughts.

“Uh.  You call him.”

“Not in the mood to talk?”

“Not really.”

“He’ll understand.”

“Yeah.”

Cas disentangles himself from Dean slowly, giving him plenty of time to protest if he wants him to stay.

“Did you want to watch a film or go back to bed?”

“Uh. Film. I won’t be able to sleep.”

“Sure. You pick. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

When Cas gets back Dean is staring, dead eyed, at the TV while Tony Stark builds a robot suit from scrap parts. It’s not a good sign. Dean’s usual reaction to Robert Downey Jr. is only just this side of drooling. But Cas knew today was going to be a bad one when he woke up and Dean’s side of the bed was cold. Cas pinches at the bridge of his nose. He finds these days hard, although obviously not as hard as Dean does. It hurts, watching someone you love hurting and knowing you can’t really do anything to help them.  But it’s a hurt that he can deal with while he does what little he can to help Dean through his.

Cas slips back out of the room, grabs their comforter and lugs it into the living room, careful not to let it trail on the somewhat dusty floor. He considers just dumping it over Dean’s head, because he’s a little shit (he learned that mainly from Dean though, so he can’t really be blamed) but reins himself in. He settles the comforter over Dean, earning a tight smile, and settles down with his back against the armrest, legs thrown across half the sofa. Dean bundles himself in the blanket like a cloak and then shuffles up so that he’s lying against Cas’s chest. Cas threads his fingers through Dean’s hair and massages his scalp gently.

They watch Tony Stark build his new suit, discover his uncle’s treachery, save the day and then announce to a startled press conference that he is Iron Man. And maybe Dean doesn’t feel any better after it, but at least he doesn’t feel like breaking shit. So they watch the next one, and the next one, and then the Avengers. And at some point they eat shitty microwave rice and switch to Netflix because they can’t be bothered with standing up to change the DVD again.

Dean is the first to fall asleep but Cas stays awake for a little while longer, tracing Dean’s features with a gentle finger and thinking about how lucky he is.

 

*

 

Sam hangs up the phone. Cas doesn’t want to come in because Dean’s having a crap day. It’s a shame, but understandable. Sam was there when Dean first came back to them, he saw the damage. He knows Cas has been helping his brother sew himself back together, piece by piece. He also knows there’s still some wreckage to be repaired, so he won’t even begrudge Cas the short notice.

He sees Cas pretty regularly because of his weekly teaching slot, but Dean never comes with him. The bunker has a lot of bad memories and triggers for him, especially as it is now. It’s been a little over a month since he’s seen his brother in the flesh, although they talk on the phone often enough. Casa Shithole, as Dean has so charmingly named his and Cas’s home, is just over an hour away. He could make that journey easily enough. Charlie and Dorothy would both be here, so it’s not like he’d be leaving the kids on their own, and it won’t kill the adult hunters to have a few days of rest from their learning.

The Winchester School of Hunting won’t dissolve without him, he knows, but it is his baby. He built it from nothing, spent a lot of time— with the help of Charlie and Dorothy— compiling a comprehensive teaching plan. He’s added so much knowledge to the world of hunter lore. The destruction of the Men of Letters by Abaddon wiped out so much valuable intelligence, left the main supernatural information base a hunter to hunter word of mouth system that worked to a degree, but was nothing like what they could have.

Even if only a couple of hunters a month come to him and learn, they’ll spread their knowledge to a couple more and so on. And in the meantime he, Charlie and Dorothy are making a good stab at turning themselves into Men and Women of Letters. Because as good as it would be to have all hunters having all knowledge, he knows how easy it is for word of mouth stuff to get forgotten. It’s always good to have a handful of people somewhere a bit more out of the fray

Of course it isn’t just hunters and trainee People of Letters in the bunker. He’s also picked up a few kids, orphaned by hunting, like Krissy, Josephine and Aidan, or just with hunter parents who don’t have anywhere else to drop them. He knows what it’s like to grow up on the road, sleeping in shitty motel rooms and eating Funyuns for dinner, so he’s more than happy to take them in. It’s nice, too. He’s never had a big family, now there are people rattling off the walls. All he needs now is a dog, and maybe a significant other. But there’s time for that. He doesn’t hunt that much anymore so he’s not quite as likely to die before he hits forty. He can wait.

He’ll talk to the others over dinner tonight; see if they’re okay with him taking off for a few days. Charlie will probably want to come with him, but he’s not sure he wants to leave just Dorothy holding down the fort. He doesn’t know this newest batch of hunters well enough to leave them almost unsupervised with the kids. It’s not that he thinks they’re going to get up to anything sketchy. It’s that he knows what hunters are like, and if he leaves them with just one grownup to supervise it’s inevitably going to be chaos.

The problems he faces these days are such a world away from those of the past that he almost finds them relaxing. Once it was _how do we throw Satan back in his cage?_ Now it’s _how do I make Krissy eat her vegetables,_ or _how do I get Rich and Dan to put the whiskey down for five minutes and pay attention to the best way to deal with ancient pagan gods._

He’s always thought he’d have a life after hunting. He can’t exactly go back and train to be a lawyer— he’s legally died twice and his criminal record is longer than he is tall, which is saying something. This way, okay so it’s not exactly after hunting, it’s more parallel to. But it makes a difference, and he’s not going to die in some dank and disgusting basement somewhere, bleeding out onto the floor. He’s gonna be okay.

 

*

 

Dean wakes up the next day, cradled in Cas’s arms on the sofa. And okay, the sun isn’t shining out of his ass or anything, but he feels content. It’s how his life goes, in cycles of good days, bad days, some perfectly average days. And the longer it goes on, the less bad days there are. He’s not stupid; he knows they’ll never go away completely. He’s had a traumatizing life, when you look back at it. It’s a miracle he can function at all. But he has it okay. He’s got a brother who loves him, and who he sees often enough for it not to jar, he’s got friends like Charlie and Garth and to an extent Dorothy (she still doesn’t completely trust him, but she’s warming very, very gradually). And he’s got Cas, who wakes up with him almost every day, who helps him through his nightmares and who, okay he doesn’t never complain. He’s a whiny little brat. But he never complains about the big stuff. He’ll throw a bitch fit at Dean for forgetting to clean the dishes, but he’ll happily cancel plans he’s had for months at a moment’s notice because Dean had a bad night, or he’ll sit with him for two hours outside the bunker because fuck, he wasn’t ready to go back in there and now he’s having a panic attack.

Dean’s got his family, he’s got his friends, and he’s got the borderline hippy ex-angel who he loves. And it’s not quite the apple pie life. But it’s good enough for him.


End file.
